I was not a theater kid, and I was much too shy (and afraid of public failure) to try out for school plays, but I have always loved to watch good actors ply their craft, and early on learned to appreciate the difference individual actors and directors could make in their interpretations of classical works of literature. Like most avid readers, I rushed to see adaptations of works I loved, and judged most of them travesties. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that I devoted my career to researching “performed fan fiction.” After all, that’s what liturgical poetry is: it retells biblical stories even as it expands them with extracanonical traditions (rabbinic aggadah, apocryphal literature, etc.) and weaves them into new and dynamic ritual settings.
My new book, Staging the Sacred: Theatricality and Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2023), attempts to think through what it means to approach liturgical poetry from late antiquity as performed works, i.e., to think of the texts we have in our hands as analogous to scripts or, even more speculatively, the written traces of dynamic, in-the-moment experiences. On the one hand, such an exercise seems kind of obvious: by definition, these poems were composed to be delivered—sung, chanted, intoned—in churches and synagogues! But the more I worked with these texts, the more I realized how little I understood what “performance” in this context meant, or how to reconstruct what the term implied. But to explain how this book came about requires that I take you back to my own origins with the literature, because in some sense, I have been writing this book for most of my career.
My study of hymnody began with Hebrew liturgical poetry, piyyutim (פיוטים), when I was in rabbinical school at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati, in my Introduction to Liturgy course. These works are written in a notoriously idiosyncratic Hebrew idiom: they are mosaics of biblical phrases and allusions embedded in a matrix of later Hebrew that resembles the Hebrew of the Mishnah, but is often apocopated to suit the demands of rhythm, rhyme, and acrostics. As someone who only studied Hebrew in any serious way as an adult, simply managing to decipher these works was the initial challenge. I wrote my seminar paper on several piyyutim for Passover that seemed impossibly obscure, and I moved on. Years later, as a doctoral student in Chicago, I reached back for these texts when I was searching for some sense of how the Song of Songs was presented to “regular” Jews in antiquity. I could not naively rely on midrash and targum as evidence for “popular” biblical interpretation, although that was commonly enough done. But the piyyutim on the Song of Songs (the scroll read during the holiday of Passover), while much more obscure and much less user-friendly, integrated the statutory prayers into their very structure: whatever problems they posed in terms of comprehensibility or familiarity, at least I knew their sitz im leben. A dissertation was born.
Working with piyyutim presented a variety of challenges. The entire body of literature was comparatively unknown in the US at the time, and the secondary scholarship almost entirely in modern Hebrew, meaning that scholars working even in closely adjacent fields, such as Christian hymnody, were unlikely to discover these works or understand reasons they should want to read them.[1] This gulf between fields proved frustrating, as the more I worked in Jewish liturgical poetry, the clearer it became that important conversations could and should be taking place across these disciplinary boundaries. It was clear that in order to facilitate these conversations, piyyutim would have to become more accessible, and so—with great trepidation—I began to lay out a two-track agenda for myself: on one track, an ambitious translation agenda, in which I would work to publish various important or representative bodies of literature in which I had some competency (please note the qualifier), in order to facilitate access to them, or at least awareness of their existence (here’s looking at you, classical Samaritan poetry!); and on the other track, more conventional, analytical work based on these bodies of literature, either as individual corpora or in comparative frameworks. As I worked through the different collections of texts that I was translating at any given time, I would mine those texts for the material necessary for any essays, articles, or presentations I needed to write, and thus I stayed on track.
I did not expect that translation, a task I undertook reluctantly and out of necessity, would lead me to write about performance, but it did not take me long to realize that much print technology, including punctuation, is encoded dramatic delivery. Every addition of a comma, quotation mark, or other editorial siglum was an imposition by me as the translator on the way my readers “heard” the text, how they imagined it being delivered. Should I end a line with a period, an exclamation point, a question mark, or no punctuation at all? Should I indicate who was speaking, or leave it unmarked—or indicate if the speaker was ambiguous? Should I capitalize “he”? As one colleague pointed out, the fact that I had to translate these works meant that I confronted head-on questions that Israeli colleagues, who worked with them in the original, rarely encountered. Colleagues who publish in Hebrew, to be sure, face analogous questions, such as that of of vocalization—how to I hear a word?—in cases where a manuscript lacks vowels or what vowels it has seem erroneous. But by and large, scholars working in the same language as the payyetanim can rely on presenting the text as they read it, and rather than translate a work, they annotate it, in order to help their (by definition) erudite readers hear specific resonances, decipher specific lexemes, and in general gain a sufficient sense of how the texts “should” be understood. By contrast, translation into English demanded that I tell my readers precisely how I understood every particle and phrase, each line of every poem, and that I use the tools and conventions of English-language typesetting—punctuation, italics, boldface, formatting, and so forth—to express that understanding on the written page. Only after I had struggled to figure out how to put the Hebrew into English (usually with too many footnotes capturing alternative nuances or possibilities) could I then begin the more conventional critical task literary analysis. And yet in the course of these closest of close readings, I realized that what had seemed a weakness—my need to present these poems in translation, in order to make them not only accessible, but maybe even sensible and coherent—offered me, as a scholar, a powerful analytical tool. The act of translation led to more expansive reflections on issues of tone and inflection, and considerations of how such nuances could be conveyed, departing the page entirely: what were the roles of voice, music, facial expression, and gesture? These lines of thinking, in turn, led me to wonder about the spaces of performance: What direction did the cantor face, and how expressive might his body have been as he embodied different characters? How did he interact with his congregation? What were sightlines like for the congregation, and how were the acoustics in ancient synagogues?
These were all questions without easy or obvious answers, but I was not entirely without resources. As I worked on “Track Two,” the analysis of the Jewish poetry for publication and presentation, I found my way into conversations taking place in Early Christian Studies, Art History and Architecture, and Classical Studies. From colleagues in these fields—fields with more “data” than I had and more advanced answers to similar questions—I encountered sources from which I could construct “probability fields” for Jewish performance, including ample evidence for the training of orators (particularly the handbooks containing rhetorical exercises known as progymnasmata) as well as the polemics against theaters and actors, which echoed rabbinic arguments on the same topic and often revealed a similarly telling familiarity with their customs and ways. Similarly, architectural historians shed light on how spaces could be, and were, updated and adapted, often with an intent to improve an audience’s ability to see and hear a performer.
Performance saturated the late ancient world: it was a noisy landscape of pop-up theaters, impromptu declamations, and spontaneous demonstrations, with the general public ready to transform into an engaged and judgmental audience (or mob) at any moment. The writings of Blake Leyerle, Georgia Frank, Ruth Webb, Derek Krueger, Charlotte Roueché, and Susan Ashbrook Harvey helped show me how to read both with and against the grain of these works.[2] Armed with this knowledge, I could take what I found in “my” texts, the Jewish works—direct speech, apostrophe, vivid descriptions, speech-in-character, and even hints at body language, such as deixis—and begin to understand them as sharing in the larger oratorical conventions of late antiquity, not because the authors were explicitly trained in declamation but because the conventions of performance so permeated late ancient society. In turn, I could view Jewish compositions alongside their Christian and Samaritan counterparts, in order to discern a kind of deep rhetorical-performative-aesthetic affinity across multiple regional, linguistic, and confessional lines.
From this line of thinking, Staging the Sacred began to take shape. It treats Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan works written in Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic (Jewish and Samaritan), and Greek, spanning the 4th through 7th century CE. The volume consists of six chapters, which move from the concrete to the speculative. It opens by examining the cultural world in which liturgical poetry emerged, a world of theater and oratory, but also homilies, exegesis, and prayer; it then turns to the roles of authors, performers, and congregations/audiences, all of whom participated in fashioning the poem’s delivery, through the crafting of its words, their delivery, or participation in refrains. It then considers sensory elements, particularly appeals to sight (ekphrasis) and the creation of vivid experiences through rhetorical performance; next, the study turns to ethopoeia (speech-in-character), the use of voice to create distinct personae within the liturgical works. Finally, I confront the challenge of envisioning the physical performances of these works in material spaces: imagined performers in reconstructed spaces. As I note in the prologue, “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” (21).
In some ways, Staging the Sacred proved a thoroughly disconcerting study. As I wrote it, I was continually reminded that the texts I have spent my career learning to read are, in practical terms, far removed from the actual phenomena I so wanted to study, the experience of the ancient synagogue. The texts resemble two-dimensional, frozen echoes from which I have tried to coax ghostly traces (perhaps illusions) of more dimensions. In the end, these poems—each a gem in its own way, a stone in the gorgeous mosaic of late antique hymnody—yielded up more insight than I might have thought they would. These were the works of master craftsmen, products of a society discerning of such artistry, and often part of the enduring liturgies of communities for centuries, not only for their words but (we may imagine) for other elements of the experience they conjured. As the volume concludes:
We cannot fully recapture the experience itself, but perhaps, with this study, we can begin to remember what once was lively and now is lost, and to hear the echoes of the once-vibrant stage. This is, after all, a world in which even God could be depicted as a pantomime:
In the time to come, the Holy Blessed One will lead the chorus (holah) of the righteous, as it is written: “Keep her ramparts (helah) in mind” (Ps. 48:14). It is written holah (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 evermore” (Ps. 48:15).[3]
Laura S. Lieber is the inaugural Chair for Transregional Religious History at the University of Regensburg (Germany); previously, she was the Smart Professor of Jewish Studies at Duke University, where she also directed the Center for Jewish Studies as well as the Elizabeth A. Clark Center for Late Ancient Studies.
[1] Recent years have seen several wonderful scholars begin to remedy this lacuna of anglophone scholarship. Readers seeking an introduction to early Jewish liturgical poetry will find Michael Swartz and Joseph Yahalom’s Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur (2004) a beautiful and accessible volume. Ophir Münz-Manor has also made tremendous contributions in this regard, including in the field of comparative hymnography, such as his essay, “Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East: A Comparative Approach,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1:3 (2010), 336-361. Wout J. van Bekkum is likewise an essential scholar whose “state of the field” essay remains useful: "The Hebrew Liturgical Poetry of Byzantine Palestine: Recent Research and New Perspectives,” Prooftexts 28.2 (2008): 232-246. For a study of piyyut oriented primarily within the Jewish literary world, see Tzvi Novik’s Piyyut and Midrash: Form, Genre, and History (2018).
[2] Rather than try to cite a bibliography of “must reads,” I offer an incomplete and eclectic bouquet of some of the works that most entranced me at my first encounter with the wider world of performance in late antiquity: Blake Leyerle’s Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom's Attack on Spiritual Marriage (2001); Derek Krueger’s Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (2004); Ruth Webb’s Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity (2009); Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s Song and Memory: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition (2010); Bissera Pentcheva’s The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (2010); and any of Georgia Frank’s articles, but I always return to her essay, “Romanos and the Night Vigil in the Sixth Century,” in the third volume of A People's History of Christianity (ed. by Derek Krueger; 2006).
[3] LevR 11.9 (Vilna ed., 17a). Quotation from Staging the Sacred, page 396.