Reading the Scriptures

The Sanctus and the Qedushah

Sebastian Selvén

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780268200022
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

What happens to the Bible when it is used in worship? What does music, choreography, the stringing together of texts, and the architectural setting itself, do to our sense of what the Bible means—and how does that influence our reading of it outside of worship? In Liturgy and Biblical Interpretation, Sebastian Selvén answers questions concerning how the Hebrew Bible is used in Jewish and Christian liturgical traditions and the impact this then has on biblical studies. This work addresses the neglect of liturgy and ritual in reception studies and makes the case that liturgy is one of the major influential forms of biblical reception. The case text is Isaiah 6: 3 and its journey through the history of worship.

By looking at the Qedushah liturgies in Ashkenazi Judaism and the Sanctus in three church traditions—(pre-1969) Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism (the Church of England), and Lutheranism (Martin Luther, and the Church of Sweden)—influential lines of reception are followed through history. Because the focus is on lived liturgy, not only are worship manuals and prayer books investigated but also architecture, music, and choreography. With an eye to modern-day uses, Selvén traces the historical developments of liturgical traditions. To do this, he has used methodological frameworks from the realm of anthropology. Liturgy, this study argues, plays a significant role in how scholars, clergy, and lay people receive the Bible, and how we understand the way it is to be read and sometimes even edited.

Liturgy and Biblical Interpretation will interest scholars of the Bible, liturgy, and church history, as well as Jewish and Christian clergy.

Introduction, Part I

Performance Matters

Every time Jews or Christians worship is an instantiation of biblical interpretation. And when the Bible comes to life through music, movement, and setting, it changes character. Psalm 23, sung to the somber tone of a Christian funeral, is a rather different text then when sung (usually after some schnapps) by Jews around a Shabbat dinner table. The word “interpretation” itself hints at this, as French-American polymath George Steiner writes in Real Presences:

An interpreter is a decipherer and communicator of meanings. He is a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions. He is, in essence, an executant, one who “acts out” the material before him so as to give it intelligible life. . . . An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. A violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.¹

Interpretation is a highly practical issue. And let us keep in mind: the interpretation of a text (in Steiner’s sense) can have quite a dramatic influence on how one later interprets it. Liturgical experiences activate or neglect certain readings of a text, and evoke certain emotive responses that can galvanize an interpretation. Jews can chuckle their way through the book of Esther even when not reading it on Purim, when the topsy-turvy nature of the liturgy reinforces the carnivalesque aspects of the text.² Mirth, sorrow, solemnity, anger—all these emotions and more can grow out of one’s reading, and especially so if those are the emotions that are encouraged liturgically. Liturgy involves us not just intellectually but also emotionally and somatically. The space in which worship takes place, the choreography according to which one moves one’s body, the sounds and sights, tastes and scents that one registers, all work to shape one’s experience of the text. Liturgy is, among other things, an experienced biblical interpretation. Like a concert, or a play, it is a performed act: liturgy is not a book, just as a concert is not its sheet music, but a moment, an action in time and space. But there is, as with a classical concert or a play, a particular text that is performed again and again.

My argument in this book is that the study of the Bible, as refracted through its ritual or liturgical reception, has been neglected by liturgical scholars but all the more so by biblical scholars.³ Liturgy is one of the many cultural activities that influence one’s understanding of the biblical text, and the study of the interrelation between the Bible and its use in liturgy deserves thorough study. I will take Isaiah 6:1–5 as my case study, and already by choosing this text, some of the factors I would like to draw attention to come into play. This is a passage that has garnered a tremendous amount of attention by biblical scholars. Why is that? Why have so many articles, monographs, and so on been written on Isaiah 6 and not, say, Isaiah 4? Why have so many given this passage new contexts in music, fiction, and poetry, from Dante to Anne Carson, Edmund Spenser to William Empson, John Donne to Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Leonard Cohen? I would venture to say that this interest—including my own—comes from the liturgical use of this text. Just as some other liturgical texts, such as Deuteronomy 6:4, have been prioritized in biblical research because of their liturgical use, so, I would argue, has Isaiah 6 been prioritized because of the familiarity with it that liturgy breeds. A telling example could be how, when discussing my research, most Jews I have spoken to have said, “Oh, you’re writing about the qedushah?” and most Christians have said, “Oh, you’re writing about the Sanctus?” For both, the liturgical reference was what first came to mind—even in speaking about this text, people do so through their liturgies.

This perspective ought to be much more represented in research. Surprisingly, this has not been the case, and until quite recently, it was not the case for almost any non- or extratextual genre of reception. Not only has there been a privileging of content over form when looking at the history of biblical texts, there has also been a privileging of abstract text over other forms of cultural activities: commentaries have been unpacked for their readings, but the study of other engagements with the biblical texts is still underdeveloped. Art, film, theater, music, and pop culture phenomena are all part of this history, and some of them have had a far greater influence on how people approach the biblical texts than even the most influential commentary. There have been attempts at remedying this by broadening the field by, for example, Cheryl Exum looking into the Bible in art history⁴ and Adele Reinhartz examining the role of the Bible in Hollywood productions.⁵ This is, to my mind, a very welcome endeavor that needs further strengthening.⁶ Timothy Beal’s call for a broadening of the field “to include not only academic and theological readings but also biblical appearances in visual art, literature, music, politics, and other works of culture, from ‘high’ to ‘low’ ” appears to be underway.⁷ It would seem, however, that some areas have been overlooked. Christopher Rowland, writing about his editorial work on the Blackwell Bible Commentary, focuses on “the different ways in which the Bible has been read and heard in history, through music, literature and art.”⁸ He believes an “openness to the varieties of effects of biblical texts puts exegesis in touch with wider intellectual currents in the humanities, so that literature, art and music become part of the modes of exegesis.”⁹ Curiously absent from both these listings of media is ritual.¹⁰

It is also a remarkable oversight when we take into account the very fact that the only Hebrew Bible we have is a liturgical text.¹¹ The Masoretic text, which is our access point to this corpus in its original language(s), is cantillated in its entirety. Our Hebrew Bible is written to be sung in synagogues and is thus an unavoidably ritual text, and, to be more precise, an unavoidably Jewish ritual text. The liturgical nature of the Hebrew Bible available today is, in a certain sense, hidden in plain sight.¹² A biblical scholar cannot get away from the fact that the liturgical instructions of qere and ketiv, for example, are written in the manuscripts themselves.

As a corpus, too, the Bible is also deeply marked by liturgy: it includes liturgical portions, such as the book of Psalms, but its very canon, as persuasively argued by Judith Newman, has also been profoundly changed and in some instances even determined by liturgical use.¹³

This neglect is also remarkable from another perspective, given the prevalence of biblical language in Jewish and Christian liturgy.¹⁴ Already the fourteenth-century liturgical commentator David Abudraham points out in his siddur commentary: “Know then that the language of prayer is founded on the language of Scripture. Because of this, you will find written in this explanation on every single word a verse like it or on its theme. And there are a few words for which a foundation in Scripture could not be found, and therefore for them I will bring a foundation from the Gemara.”¹⁵ This has been repeated by Ruth Langer, who writes on Jewish prayer: “Hardly a word of the prayer lacks a biblical echo.”¹⁶ Reuven Kimelman, championing the study of biblical hypotexts in Jewish liturgy, writes: “The meaning of the liturgy exists not so much in the liturgical text per se as in the interaction between the liturgical text and the biblical intertext. Meaning, in the mind of the reader, takes place between texts rather than within them.”¹⁷ The same, of course, holds true for much of Christian worship. This interpretative activity is often glossed over, though it might be one of the most influential sites of biblical interpretation. Diarmaid MacCulloch points out concerning the Book of Common Prayer:

Its liturgy was not a denominational artefact; it was the literary text most thoroughly known by most people in this country, and one should include the Bible among its lesser rivals. This was because the English and the Welsh were active participants in the BCP [Book of Common Prayer], as they made their liturgical replies to the person leading worship in the thousands of churches throughout the realm: they were actors week by week in a drama whose cast included and united most of the nation, and which therefore was a much more significant play, and more culturally central, than anything by Shakespeare.¹⁸

What could be added to this important observation is that through the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, too, entered the mouths and minds of all those worshippers.¹⁹ A less central cultural activity in the West than it once was, liturgy is still a potent interpretation of biblical texts. In it, the Bible is a script to be performed, and so is remade, day after day, week after week. Many biblical scholars still come from a religious background, and even among those who do not, most are embedded—at least in the most general sense—in a certain religious tradition, owing to culture and geography, if nothing else. As Stefan C. Reif amply demonstrates in his recent collection of essays, Jews, Bible and Prayer (2017), liturgy shapes our pre-understanding of a text: which texts are important, which texts are connected, and often how they are to be read. Certain readings are reinforced, and certain potential aspects of a text activated, through their use in liturgy, while others are neglected or even muted. Some of the readings encouraged through liturgy may be helpful, some innocuous, but some may be problematic, even harmful.

An instructive example here is that of Isaiah 6:1–5, which will serve as our case study. This pericope is far from a peripheral text; in fact, it is probably one of the most well-known biblical texts, to a large extent for liturgical reasons. This text has been chosen because of its fame rather than its obscurity, and it will serve to exemplify my argument since it has been employed in related but diverse Jewish and Christian settings. In the chapters of this study, I will trace its liturgical use in Jewish, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions. It should be stressed at the outset that I am not presenting a comprehensive historical overview. Rather, I have chosen examples of illuminating interpretational choices in the liturgy. I have selected certain trends and “summit moments” where in my view the text has been taken in new directions, and often this has meant providing context. Much of the chapter material is dedicated to a historical investigation, but the purpose of this is to provide background for and examples of influential liturgical traditions that have shaped the interpretation of this text and that continue to exercise an influence today. This has also dictated the choices of traditions. Rather than taking an encyclopedic approach, which would have included, for example, Eastern Christian liturgies, I have chosen those religious traditions that are well represented and influential in modern biblical research.

RECEPTION STUDIES

Because this is an investigation into the reception study of the Bible, it might be worth considering some of the issues that have come up within this field and how they relate to this study. Reception studies have come a long way, from being a rebel to an established subfield in its own right. However, it is now no longer seen as unorthodox so much as at risk of calcifying, as can be seen in critiques of it.²⁰ One recent such critique concerns some of the core assumptions of why reception studies should even be separated into a distinct field. Reception studies have traditionally been set up in opposition to historical-critical approaches as the tracing of what the text has meant after its production or formalization. Its subject matter has often been understood the way John Sawyer characterizes it: “The history of how a text has influenced communities and cultures down the centuries.”²¹ Lately, this distinction has turned out to be untenable, and in order to situate this study in the larger field, some issues need to be dealt with.²² A reasonable point of departure would be how the reading process can be imagined, followed by a return to what this might mean for the problematic division between original and reception.

My two core assumptions in this study are that reading is (1) a process undergoing constant mutation and (2) that our academic ways of reading—from historical-critical to postcolonial—are themselves part of the reception of the text, rather than a meta-operation taking place above it. The first assumption constitutes, in effect, a view of liturgy not entirely unlike that of certain theoreticians of literature, according to whom lived experiences and snippets of everyday storytelling are arranged and restructured in the encounter with a text. Liturgy, like a novel, presents a participant/reader with suggestions for how to understand everyday life by organizing concepts, terms, and acts in a specific way, to which the participant/reader reacts in one way or another.²³ Liturgy not only restructures how a person might interpret and string together one’s own lived experiences, but also how one might interpret and draw connections between biblical passages that are liturgically presented in a certain order and context. By putting biblical verses together in a certain way, certain readings are more likely to occur.²⁴

And if liturgy, as a form of reception, can restructure the ways in which an individual reads biblical texts, how does that work on a macro level, in an academic field? My second assumption is this, and scholars of liturgy will have to excuse me for mainly addressing the biblical side of things in this section: that we as scholars in the field ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction, Part I: Performance Matters
• Introduction, Part II: Liturgical Material—Qedushah and Sanctus
• Chapter 1 Holy the Hideous Human Angels: The Identity of the Seraphim
• Chapter 2 Hymning the Eternal Father: The Function of Isaiah 6:3
• Chapter 3 The God Approached: Divine Presence in the Liturgy
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index