Thursday, March 10, 2005

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice

The seminars scheduled for next week deal with the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the calendrical texts. Tonight I'll give you a few links that deal with the SOSS.

Here's the entry from the Library of Congress exhibit on the SOSS. It includes a photograph of 4Q403 (click on it for an enlargement), some information on the work, and an excerpt from Newsom's translation.

Here's an abstract of a paper on the SOSS ("The Macrocosmic Temple, Scriptural Exegesis, and the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice") which I presented in my 2001 Dead Sea Scrolls conference. The whole paper was published as an article in Dead Sea Discoveries in 2002. You can access it here, but it requires a paid personal or institutional subscription. Other relevant papers from that conferences included my "Melchizedek, the 'Youth,' and Jesus: the Dead Sea Scrolls and Messianism, Christology, and Mysticism" (abstract); Ra'anan Abusch, "Seven-fold Praise in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and the Hekhalot Literature: Literary Context and Historical Continuity in Early Hebrew Hymnic Poetry" (abstract); and Alexander Golitzin, "Recovering the Glory of Adam: Selected Themes from the Dead Sea Scrolls Present in the Macarian Homilies and Other Christian Ascetic Writings of Fourth-Century Syro-Mesopotamia" (abstract). All three were published in the conference volume.

My book Liturgical Works (Eerdmans Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls 6; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000) has a long chapter on the SOSS. You can read part of it in the Amazon excerpt, although it doesn't work very well with a dial-up connection. The entry on the Eerdmans website works better and also has an excerpt on the SOSS.

NOTE: Blogger has been suffering numerous server errors recently, which has led to annoyances such as stuttered posts and posting lost during publishing. It also makes it very hard sometimes to correct typos. Apologies in advance for any problems.