God, Gods, and Godhead in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice

Noam Mizrahi

1 Introduction

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice is a liturgical composition found in about ten fragmentary copies among the .1 The Songs is acknowl- edged to be one of the most enigmatic works discovered among the scrolls, especially because of its notoriously ambiguous language, which renders dif- ficult the precise interpretation of many passages. Little wonder, then, that its original provenance remains a matter of debate, and that scholars disagree as to whether it was composed within sectarian circles or imported from another (either distant or adjacent) group of Second Temple Judaism.2 Be that as it

1 Two passages of the work (now designated as 4Q403 1 i 16–26; 4Q405 20 ii–22 7–14 [= J 17–24]) were first made known to the scholarly community by J. Strugnell, “The Angelic Liturgy at : 4Q Serek Šîrôt ʿÔlat Haššabbāt,” in Congress Volume: Oxford 1959, ed. G. W. Anderson et al., VTSup 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 318–45. The manuscripts were fully pub- lished in the admirable preliminary edition of C. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Edition, HSS 27 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985). For the official publication of the 4Q and Masada manuscripts see C. Newsom, “Shirot ʿOlat Hashabbat,” in Qumran Cave 4.VI: Poetical and Liturgical Texts, Part 1, ed. E. Eshel et al., DJD 11 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 173– 401, pl. xvi–xxxi; cf. Y. Yadin and C. Newsom, “The Masada Fragment of the Qumran Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice,” in S. Talmon, ed., Masada: The Excavations 1963–1965, Final Reports, 6: Hebrew Fragments from Masada (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1999), 120–32. For the 11Q material, see F. García Martínez, E. J. C. Tigchelaar and A. S. van der Woude, “17. 11QShirot ʿOlat ha-Shabbat,” in Qumran Cave 11.II: 11Q2–18, 11Q20–31, DJD 23 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 259–304, pl. xxx–xxxiv, liii; cf. E. J. C. Tigchelaar, “Reconstructing 11Q17 Shirot ʿOlat Ha-Shabbat,” in The Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: Technological Innovations, New Texts, and Reformulated Issues, ed. D. W. Parry and E. Ulrich, STDJ 30 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 171–85. A new composite edition is that of E. Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew Writings, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2010–2014), 2:358–84 (in Hebrew). In citing the Songs, I usually follow Qimron’s readings. 2 Newsom herself changed her mind on the matter. In the preliminary edition, she favored— albeit not too decidedly—a sectarian provenance; see Newsom, Songs, 1–4, 73–74. But later on she preferred to view the work as a presectarian composition that was adopted by the Qumran community; see C. Newsom, “‘Sectually Explicit’ Literature from Qumran,” in The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, ed. W. H. Propp, B. Halpern, and D. N. Freedman (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 167–87. More recently, attempts have been made to use evidence culled from phraseology to support a notion of sectarian provenance. See H. W. M. Rietz,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004384231_009 162 Mizrahi may, the sheer number of its copies indicates that the Songs held a central place in the cultic practice and hence, presumably, also in the religious world- view of the community or communities whose writings were unearthed in the Judean Desert. The purpose of the present study is to explore the possibility that some of the diverse difficulties tackled by all commentators on the text are caused not so much by its dazzling language as by a radical conception of the nature of the divinity. This proposal is not intended to be viewed as a definitive statement but rather as a working hypothesis. It came up as part of my ongoing work on a new philological commentary on the Songs, and I present here only a sketch that requires much further contemplation.3 Still, and notwithstanding the provisional nature of the thesis presented herein, there seems to be enough evidence to suggest the need for at least rethinking the common assumptions concerning the concept of the deity that underlies the Songs. Current consensus on this matter has been concisely and effectively sum- marized by Philip Alexander in a recent discussion of the type of religious ex- perience reflected in the Songs:4

There is no absorption into God in Qumran mysticism: the gulf between the Creator and his creatures is not crossed. A superficial reading of the texts might suggest that there is a constant blurring of the boundaries between God and the highest angels. For example, one of the ubiquitous titles of the angels is “Gods” (ʾElohim), but closer analysis shows that there is no real confusion in the minds of the writers. They explicitly stress that the angels are God’s creatures, and they are constantly shown

“Identifying Compositions and Traditions of the Qumran Community: The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice as a Test Case,” in Qumran Studies: New Approaches, New Questions, ed. M. T. Davies and B. A. Strawn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 29–52; H. W. M. Rietz and B. A. Strawn, “(More) Sectarian Terminology in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: The Case ibid., 53–64; D. Dimant, “The Vocabulary of the Qumran Sectarian Texts,” in ”,תמימי דרך of Qumran und die Archäologie, ed. J. Frey, C. Claussen, and N. Kessler, WUNT 278 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 347–95, especially 390–91. 3 Any deduction concerning the theological content of a text obviously relies on a particular interpretation of its wording. In this respect, my understanding of the Songs differs in many points from Newsom’s influential edition and translation, which had shaped the contempo- rary consensus. Still, it was not possible to defend in detail the rendition of each and every passage of the Songs that is quoted below, and I had to contend with references to other publications of mine, in which I discuss some such philological matters. I ask the reader to bear with the resulting extensive self-referencing. 4 P. S. Alexander, “Qumran and the Genealogy of Western Mysticism,” in New Perspectives on Old Texts: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 9–11 January, 2005, ed. E. G. Chazon, B. Halpern- Amaru, and R. A. Clements, STDJ 88 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 215–35 (222–23).