The Arians . . . previously assembled by night in the public porticoes, and were divided into bands, so that they sang antiphonally, for they had composed certain refrains which reflected their own dogma. . . . John [Chrysostom] was fearful lest any of his own church people should be led astray by witnessing these exhibitions, and therefore commanded them to sing hymns in the same manner. . . . Having commenced the custom of singing hymns in the manner and from the cause above stated, the members of the Catholic Church did not discontinue the practice, but have retained it to the present day.
~SozomenFootnote 1
Introduction
In his evocative analysis of Christian congregational activism in fifth-century Hippo, Brent Shaw observes how fluidly practices of communal chanting—conveying approval, rejection, or mockery—moved among religious, theatrical, and civic venues. Popular acclamation and protest could be both spontaneous and elaborate because it reflected a pervasive norm of civic behavior in antiquity.
Public chanting functioned so well precisely because it was a performance that was understood by the great and the small, and that linked them. . . . [T] he chants were not invented on occasions such as these. The people were well educated in their own culture. Like the combatants of Caesarea, they already knew what to do. Some of the chants had been transferred to the church from municipal elections, others from the arena and the theater.Footnote 2
As Shaw also observes, “The bishop as preacher was one voice of the divine, but the powerful collective enunciations of the people counted in the same way.”Footnote 3 Communal chant was commonplace throughout late ancient society; it constituted a potent cultural mechanism enabling the people to speak, loudly, to the powerful, in almost any setting. Collective, communal voices colored every public assembly, whether political, theatrical, athletic, religious, or mixed.
The composition, performance, social setting, significance, and recording of acclamatory chanting in antiquity has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. In addition to Shaw's important work on the communal dynamics of chant creation and performance, Charlotte Roueché has written on the importance of writing (stenography as well as epigraphy) both for preserving the texts of acclamations and indicating their significance as something worthy of preservation.Footnote 4 Gregory Aldrete's Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome provides a comprehensive overview of how verbal and nonverbal communications interpenetrated diverse social settings, while Garrett Fagan and others include acclamation in their work on the pervasive appeal of spectacle.Footnote 5 Finally, Michael Stuart Williams’ analysis of the hymns of Ambrose of Milan as acclamation offers a case-study of a specific, significant episode which, significantly for the present study, introduces a liturgical component to the subject.Footnote 6
Williams approaches Ambrose's hymns as performed compositions. He suggests mechanisms by which congregational participation in the performance of liturgical poetry may have been facilitated while underscoring concrete constructive consequences of congregational engagement in the performance of hymns. His work suggests new ways of appreciating other episodes, such as Chrysostom's choral duels with the Arians, and helps elucidate more generally both how and why hymnography seems to appear in multiple religious communities in Late Antiquity simultaneously.Footnote 7 Williams and Shaw draw attention to a particular moment when acclamation and liturgy seem to converge in both the East and West: the late-fourth and early-fifth centuries CE. Ambrose and Chrysostom provide evidence of Christian and Arian practices in Hippo and Constantinople (and perhaps Antioch, whence came Chrysostom).
This essay will argue that similar patterns can be discerned in Jewish poetry from this same period. The works examined below are by Yose ben Yose (ca. fourth/fifth century CE, Land of Israel). Reading Yose's compositions through the lens of acclamation promises to illuminate the issue of “congregational participation” in synagogue liturgy—and other liturgical practices, by extension—because such an approach helps establish the broader, conventional dynamics among the performer (here, the cantor), the figure of authority (the deity), and the audience (the worshippers).
Given how little we can know with certainty about liturgical performance in the synagogues of antiquity, scholars have increasingly come to value insights that can be gleaned from comparative studies, extrapolated from contextual sources, and mined from the texts sources themselves. While some scholars have speculated that communal response was restricted in the synagogue, as in the Temple, others now argue that the “democratizing” process of the liturgy extended to popular recitation of psalms and prayers once restricted to priests and Levites.Footnote 8 Furthermore, Jews and Christians alike were attuned to theater, politics, and a range of performances, civic and religious; their writings reveal awareness of and curiosity about each other's rituals. Jews and Christians alike read themselves into their liturgies not only through emotional sympathy with what they heard, but through active participation by means of speaking.Footnote 9
While current studies often assume robust congregational engagement, the larger cultural context which created expectations for popular participation in liturgical performance remains unexamined—despite the fact that we see the rise of this practice in the fourth century CE, in the East and West, in Christianity, Samaritanism, and Judaism. In this study, rhetorical structures found in (but far from unique to) Jewish poetry from Late Antiquity strengthen emerging understandings concerning the role of the congregation in worship generally. Poetic repetitions are not “merely” rhetorical or aesthetic; they reflect the widespread popularity of acclamation as a mechanism enabling plebian dialogue with the powers that be.
Yose's surviving body of works is limited, but he was influential within the Jewish tradition, and his poems have long been noted for their use of formal features such as fixed-word repetitions and refrains—features which align not only with poetic norms from the biblical period to Late Antiquity but also with the practice of acclamation. Jews attended (and performed in) the theater and games; they were familiar with rhetorical and oratorical training and related literary norms; and they were integrated socially, commercially, and politically into diverse and varied communities.Footnote 10 The affinity of Jewish liturgical poetry from antiquity for other forms of poetic composition reflects Jews’ general embeddedness in the culture of Late Antiquity.Footnote 11 Reading Yose's poetry as shaped by the conventions of acclamation highlights how Yose and his congregants were not only distinctly Jewish but also thoroughly Roman.
The Social Setting of Acclamation
The term “acclamation” derives from the Latin acclamo, “to shout” (with a secondary meaning, “to protest,” and a tertiary meaning of “to approve, applaud”).Footnote 12 In practice, “acclamation” translates a variety of Greek and Latin terms which differ considerably in connotation but which have content, form, and performance in common: conclamatio, vox, adclamatio in Latin; phōnē, ekboēsis, and euphēmia in Greek—among others. As Charlotte Roueché notes, “For this reason [the diversity of terminology], the occasions on which acclamations are used have not always been recognized or understood: it is only by the identification of some of the characteristic terminology, and by the discriminating analysis of a wide variety of texts that our understanding of the phenomenon has gradually been advanced.”Footnote 13 In general, the practice of responsive shouting—in public, in unison, by a crowd, directed at a specific figure who was perceived as possessing concrete powers—was widespread. It was associated with weddings (where guests would exclaim “Io Hymen!” and “Talassio!”), with military triumphs (at which the public would assemble and shout “Io, Triumphe!”), and with religious ritual (e.g., famously in Acts 19:24–31, where the Ephesian silversmiths rally against Paul using the pagan cultic cry [ekrazon], “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”). Acclamations could honor or critique powerful individuals of various ranks and stations, from the Emperor to local magistrates, in a range of public venues, including theaters and circuses. As J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz notes, acclamations “formed a continuous accompaniment of public life.”Footnote 14 These chants occurred, spontaneously but not haphazardly, in settings where crowds gathered and where a powerful figure was in attendance (e.g., the emperor attending the games). Conversely, the rhetorical force of acclamation, fueled by the presence of an authority, could also help gather a crowd. These chants offered both a demonstration of and a means for creating public unity, expressing favor or disfavor, rallying support or opposition. It was a way of meeting and greeting the powerful with a display of parallel power.
Reflecting the diversity of terminology and use in the original sources, scholars employ the term “acclamation” in varied ways: Aldrete hews faithfully to the essential idea of acclamation as “any shouted comment”Footnote 15; Roueché offers a more elaborate definition: “the expression, in unison, of wish, opinion or belief, by a large gathering of people, often employing conventional rhythms and turns of phrase”;Footnote 16 Williams, by contrast, considers acclamations and popular songs together as “a means by which a crowd could express support, opinions, and political demands, or merely its natural exuberance.”Footnote 17 The sheer diversity of terminology reflects the ubiquity of the practice.Footnote 18 In general, the key elements distinguishing acclamation from other modes of speech are: (1) its public performance—whether at a theater, civic gathering, or religious ritual; (2) its emphasis on verbalized unity, a crowd of people speaking with one voice, at volume; and (3) its orientation towards a specific, powerful audience (whether a magistrate, bishop, emperor, or deity). Acclamations transform brief vocalizations that would otherwise be monologues—whether phrases from a theatrical performance, a political declamation, or even the “speech” of a person or group's presence—into a very specific variety of implicit dialogue.
The creation and deployment of such expressions reflects a widespread and sophisticated cultural literacy, as these shouts could be rehearsed or spontaneously deployed—but even when “spontaneous,” we can infer skill, experience, and craftsmanship among participants. Indeed, as with the shout of “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians,” transferred from religious ritual to civic protest in Acts 19, or the hymns of Ambrose translated from the church to the public square, a single cry or anthology of shouts could be adapted to a variety of circumstances. Context, form, and performance, not themes or content per se, defined an utterance as an acclamation.Footnote 19
The Composition of Acclamations: Anticipation of Refrains
As performed (often spontaneous) speech, acclamations possess two particularly notable features: they are formulaic (often with specific words repeated), and they are rhythmic. These two features encourage large-scale participation. As Aldrete notes, “Verbal formulas allowed large numbers of people to communicate directly with a minimum of planning . . . acclamations could serve as powerful vehicles of spontaneous expressions because, within the basic structures of acclamations, words could easily be altered to convey a variety of messages.”Footnote 20 The rhythmic nature of the chants, which often verged upon verse, further assisted mass participation, enabling people to join spontaneous acclamations quickly and forcefully.Footnote 21 Crowds, alert to the potential of acclamations—like audiences at modern rallies, revivals, protests, and sporting events—were evidently quick to join chants (and associated practices such as rhythmic clapping), which sometimes arose spontaneously and in other cases may have been orchestrated by partisan claques, whose leaders functioned as literal cheerleaders.Footnote 22 A dynamic still evident in ecclesial contexts, the unrehearsed and spontaneous give-and-take between speaker and congregation (“call and response”), offers perhaps the closest analogy to ancient acclamations, including the religious context and overtones which would have colored ancient spectacles including plays, gladiatorial games, and civic installations.Footnote 23 Experienced audiences came anticipating and prepared to participate in the sermon, while novice listeners, unfamiliar with the customs of the dialogical performance, might have found themselves adrift.Footnote 24 The rich sensory experience of participating in group speech—speaking in unison with others speaking, and at volume—achieves a powerful effect, orchestrating not only a group experience but a shared identity among those who combined their voices into a collective.
While acclamations could be very short and simple—a word or phrase—they could become quite elaborate.Footnote 25 Indeed, in Late Antiquity, complex acclamations become common, and were often recorded. The senatorial reception of the Theodosian Code, the epigraphic acclamations of Aphrodisias, the inscribed Palestinian milestones from the reign of Julian, and the recorded chants of the Blue and Green factions all indicate how acclamation turned into a civic and imperial ceremonial.Footnote 26 The anti-Arian hymn performances by Ambrose and John Chrysostom—contemporaries of the hymnographer Ephrem the Syrian—illustrate Christian adaptations of commonplace practices.Footnote 27
Certainly, complexity did not inhibit participation. As Williams notes, “To participate even in a complex acclamation required no great expertise or any substantial preparation. . . . Such rhythms and formulas were already familiar to virtually everyone in the empire, whether from theater songs or the popular songs that derived from them, or from participation in previous acclamations.”Footnote 28 In a variety of contexts, from entertainment venues to religious worship to civic and political occasions, people expected to make their voices heard and, as Roueché notes, by the fifth century CE, they could expect their voices to be recorded, transmitted, and heard again.Footnote 29 Religion was lived out in the public square alongside other civic activities. “It is important for scholars to remember,” Susan Ashbrook Harvey writes, “how much religious activity took place outdoors, in public, widely accessible spaces: as processions through city streets, or in marketplaces or other civic areas.”Footnote 30
Within this culture of acclamation—a society highly attuned to rhythmic, communal vocalization at volume as an enactment of unity and a collective response to power—liturgical poetry, including Jewish hymnography, emerged and flourished. By the sixth century CE—the period of the classical Jewish poets such as Yannai and the great Byzantine hymnographer of Constantinople, Romanos the Melodist—intricate poetic forms such as the Hebrew qedušta’ and Greek kontakion had developed, and these works make sophisticated use of techniques that strongly resemble acclamation.Footnote 31 But the influence of acclamation can be traced back several centuries prior to Yannai and Romanos, to the time of Ambrose in the West and the first flowering of hymnography in the East.
Jewish Acclamation: Artifacts, Analogues, and Antecedents
Jewish sources indicate that Jews were active participants in the broad culture of Late Antiquity. We have abundant evidence of civic infrastructure, including bathhouses, theaters, and amphitheaters, and epigraphic evidence of Jewish presence in these venues.Footnote 32 We find the casual use of acclamatory language in funerary inscriptions, such as the brief exclamation “shalom” common in such markers as well as in sources such as the epitaph from Thessalonica, which includes a fresco depicting a menorah and the acclamation, “The Lord is with us (Κύριος μεθ’ ἡμῶν)!” (LXX Ps 45:8 and 12).Footnote 33 These monumental and literary sources reveal an acculturated, organically-participatory Jewish population in the Land of Israel and beyond, which left behind literary evidence of their participation in acclamatory culture, as well. Their epitaphs speak, as it were, through voices whose acclamations are inscribed on stone.
Within the biblical text, we find examples of short acclamations even in early texts, such as 1 Sam 10:24 and 1 Kgs 1:39Footnote 34—notably both occurring in the context of enthronement and the king's relationship with his people. Most directly, however, liturgical poetry can be seen as a synergistic development located at the intersection of biblical poetic traditions and Roman aesthetics. And yet, the Jewish liturgical poetry of Late Antiquity was recognized as something innovative: the very term piyyuṭ, a Hebraicizing of the Greek poēsis, indicates this poetry's novelty.Footnote 35 Indeed, it is striking that the fourth century CE witnessed a sudden flourishing of new forms of liturgical poetry not only in Judaism (as in the piyyutim of Yose ben Yose, examined below) but also in Christianity (the memrē and madrashē of Ephrem), and among the Samaritans (the poetry of Amram Dara and Marqah).Footnote 36 In all of these traditions, we find evidence of choruses and refrains, which raises the question of whether in some fashion the dialogical, call-and-response practice of acclamation influenced liturgical poetic practice.
While acclamation reflects Roman practice, it resonates with the prayer practices of Jews, Christians, and Samaritans, as well. In all three communities, familiar—that is, scriptural—texts were deployed in new contexts, as part of constructing a dialogue between ruler and subjects. The familiarity of the source material facilitated participation even as the setting implied one kind of audience dynamic (prayer leader-congregation) and constructed or asserted another (God-people). A brief examination of the use of biblical texts in the liturgy of the synagogue can suggest ways in which acclamation, as a concept and a familiar practice, could have colored congregational chant and amplified the implicit dialogue of the liturgy in general. Any text—a biblical verse, a psalm, a poem—held the potential to become an acclamation if recited repeatedly in unison before a figure of power. Within the Hebrew Bible, we find texts that seem to anticipate the power of the communal setting through their presumed use in Temple worship, while the acclamatory potential of other texts was only activated in the context of the synagogue liturgy. The dynamic performance of liturgical poetry in Late Antiquity may be understood, in part, as an amplification of a minor feature of biblical poetry under the influence of new societal fashions. Within its venerable, sacred corpus, the Bible offered what could be understood as acclamations, and authentic modes of expression found new significance and vibrancy in the right cultural moment.Footnote 37 These models legitimated what was already popular.
Psalms 118 and 136, for example, probably reflect Jerusalem Temple liturgy. They share the refrain “for His loyalty endures forever” (
) and display a structure that suggests antiphonal performance.Footnote 38 Other biblical poems, such as Psalm 145 (an acrostic) and the Song at the Sea (Exodus 15), lack refrains and offer no sense of an original life-setting, but their strong cadences and parallelism nonetheless lend themselves to a call-and-response liturgical use, not only in theory but in practice.Footnote 39 The two-voiced, rhythmic, and participatory nature of these liturgical performances would certainly have resonated with those immersed in a culture of acclamation, and it may be that the popularity of acclamation led to modes of performing these texts. Non-poetic biblical texts that entered liturgical use, such as Isa 6:3 (known in Hebrew as the Qeduššah, in Greek as the Trisagion, and in Latin as the Sanctus) and Deut 6:4–5 (the Shema‘) likewise can be seen as having an affinity for acclamation. The biblical words are familiar, recitation highlights their aural cadence, and in the congregational context they enact a deep concept of unity: the Qeduššah unites the human congregation at worship with the heavenly hosts who are likewise at prayer, while the Shema‘ expressly articulates divine singularity even as it constitutes congregational unity.Footnote 40 The dialogical dynamic of liturgy, with its evocative scriptural words addressed by the community in a common voice to a remote yet present deity, resonates with the theatrical and civic settings and practices of acclamation.
While biblical texts could be translated into acclamation, liturgical poetry directly engages acclamatory aesthetics, practices, and efficaciousness. Yose's poetry is not unique in this regard, but it represents the formative period of the genre. By the late-sixth century, elaborate poetic forms such as the qedushtah, which included elements of refrain as well as other modes of congregational participation, emerged.Footnote 41 The poetry written in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) more closely parallels Yose ben Yose's poetry. JPA poetry, while difficult to date precisely, originated in the same period as Yose (ca. fourth century CE), and its works make use of many of the same formal features that will be noted below: they are almost always structured by alphabetical acrostics but otherwise generally simple in form; and they often have terse (but sometimes antiphonal) refrains.Footnote 42 The JPA poems are a larger body of work than Yose's, however, and considerably more diverse. Formally, the JPA poems resemble the simplicity of Yose ben Yose and the later poets, and they could easily be analyzed as acclamations.Footnote 43
As this brief survey indicates, Yose's use of refrains does not stand out as innovative, for there are ample biblical, liturgical, and poetic analogues to his writing. And all of these works, in the context of synagogue liturgy, may well merit examination as a form of acclamation. Acclamation, understood as a dynamic dialogue with divine authority, offers God both gratitude and critique, and undergirds other liturgical practices of the early synagogue—and, by extension, other forms of worship in antiquity. The poetry of Yose ben Yose provides one case study.
Piyyuṭ and Acclamation: The Example of Yose ben Yose
Yose ben Yose was among the great Jewish poets (payyeṭanim) of Late Antiquity. He wrote almost exclusively for the Jewish High Holy Days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), and he is best known for his Avodah poems, which narrate the history of the world from Creation to the moment of the High Priest's offering in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, and his series of poems for the Shofar service, which remain part of the Ashkenazi liturgy.Footnote 44 Yose, whom the tenth-century rabbinic sage Saadia Gaon ranked among the “fathers of poetry,” almost certainly lived in the Land of Israel in the fourth century CE, and he remains the earliest Jewish liturgical poet whom we know by name.Footnote 45
Yose was roughly contemporary not only with Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine, but also with Ephrem the Syrian, the father of Syriac Christian poetry, and Amram Dara and Marqah, the early great Samaritan poets. All these writers inhabited a moment when hymnography was transforming liturgy and where acclamation in a variety of public (civic, theatrical, and athletic) settings was commonplace. Viewing Yose's poetry through the lens of acclamation helps to shed light on how liturgical poems were composed, performed, and popularized within the synagogue but also beyond.Footnote 46 Furthermore, the poems examined here were composed for the penitential season of the month of Elul, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, a period when communal participation was particularly high.
Among Yose's collected works, five compositions contain refrains. Each of the three poems for his Shofar service on Rosh Hashanah includes a single word repeated at the end of every line (known in Hebrew as 
, “fixed word”): “kingship” (
) concludes each line of the first poem, on the theme of divine sovereignty (malkiyyot); “memory” (
) concludes each line of the second poem, on the theme of divine remembrance (zikronot); and “voice” (
) completes each line of the third poem upon the blast of the shofar, one of the ritual elements most associated with the holiday of Rosh Hashanah (shopharot).Footnote 47 Yose's hymn, “Once You Set Us at the Head” (
) repeats a single word, “we sinned” (
), at the end of every two-line unit.Footnote 48 The fifth composition, “Truly Our Sins” (
), reflects a more elaborate aesthetic: it includes two alternating refrains, each of which consists of four stichs.Footnote 49 Refrains and related poetic structures, when articulated in the context of the liturgy, constitute a variety of acclamation; read in silence or recited in solitude, they might augment an emotional experience of penitence or awe, but they would acclaim nothing. When realized in the context of a liturgical performance, however, these formal elements facilitated composition, enlivened group experience, augmented rhetorical force, and assisted memorization.Footnote 50 Furthermore, the repetition and volume of acclamation would have enhanced the simple comprehensibility of the communal elements of the poetry. To some extent, many religious rituals took place in spacious venues, where acoustics might have posed a challenge; but, as Susan Ashbrook Harvey reminds us, “There was also an aesthetic sensibility that understood loud sound as an appropriate adornment of religious ritual; and further, that encouraged participation in those terms in order to express willing and active presence on the part of the congregation.”Footnote 51 Repetition and reiteration not only increased participation, it increased volume, and with increased volume came amplified physical sensation and experience.
In terms of form, Yose's works reflect variations on a common composition. They are unrhymed but rhythmic and employ acrostics as structural devices. Lines are composed of two or four stichs, each of which contains two main stresses; thus each line contains four or eight stressed “beats.” These formal elements of acrostic, rhythm, fixed words, and refrains facilitated composition, in that they provided a scaffolding within which the poet could demonstrate his creativity. At the same time, recurring, repetitive structures of the different poems also facilitated congregational participation, just as the repetitions of acclamations transformed a simple shout into a rallying cry.Footnote 52 Cadence induces a certain kind of actively engaged listening and sympathetic body motion; acrostics generate a sense of forward motion and an implicit narrative arc; and repeated words invite verbal participation—precisely the kind of audibly-voiced, even physically-sensed expression of communal identity in the presence of power that constitutes acclamation.
The three Shofar service poems share a common form: each line contains four stichs (and thus eight stressed syllables); every line concludes with the theme-word of that poem, which bears a stress; and each pair of lines shares an acrostic letter (that is, lines 1–2 begin with aleph; lines 3–4 begin with bet; lines 5–6 with gimmel; and so forth).Footnote 53 The first pair of lines states in full:
The narrator speaks here, as in each of the three Shofar service poems, in the singular first-person (“I”). The performer's individual voice represents the collective speech of Israel. But with communal recitation of each line's final word (“kingship,” “memory,” and “voice,” respectively) the poem does, in fact, speak in the congregation's unified voice. As the poem progresses, the chant of “kingship”—asserting God's ultimate sovereignty—becomes an acclamation.Footnote 54 The forcefulness of the congregation's speech enacts the reality and implicitly establishes an authority counter to the power structures of the imperial world. Within the synagogue walls, it is God who is acclaimed as emperor.Footnote 55 The intense repetition of this poem resonates with other attributions of divine rule throughout the synagogue liturgy, including the standard benedictory formulate “Blessed are You, O Lord our God, King of world. . .” (
). The isolated, even if repeated, uses of the royal title in the prose prayers acquire new forcefulness and intensity in the forty-six repetitions of the title in this poem.
The subsequent poems of the Shofar service assert other divine qualities. In the second poem, “I am afraid on account of my deeds” (
), the poet speaks in the first person, for himself and for the congregation he represents, but he collapses time such that the listeners stand among their ancestors in the presence of the High Priest. The poem elaborates upon the atonement rituals for Yom Kippur as depicted in Exodus and Leviticus, but rather than narrate the laws and rites from a distance, Yose takes his listeners into the experience, as direct witnesses to events long defunct in practice. He makes them privy to thoughts such as, “I delighted when he [i.e., the high priest] put on the ephod” (l. 7); internal monologues, such as: “Look, O God, as I stand before You” (l. 9) and “Oh Yah, I trust in You” (l. 20); all of these speak for the individual at prayer, but also for the poet and, by extension, every individual who ever participated in these rites.Footnote 56 The word “memory” (
) concludes every line, and it stands in variously for God's power of judgment (“the day of memory” in line two) and divine love (which God is to “remember” in line 49), and it also represents the power of liturgy to inculcate a sense of continuity with the remote past. The repeated assertions of “memory,” which the people say to themselves as well as to God, not only effect atonement but create memories among the people for rites they have never witnessed.
In the final poem of the cycle, “I would flee to my Helper” (
), the poet continues to speak in a singular voice.Footnote 57 Where the first poem, on God's sovereignty, wove itself around Exodus 15, and the second, on the role of memory in atonement, focused on Priestly sources, here, in a poem that reflexively and self-consciously draws attention to the dialogue of the God-Israel relationship, the most prominent intertext in the final poem is the Song of Songs.Footnote 58 The fixed-word of this poem, which can be understood as a kind of analogue to an acclamation, is simply the word “voice” (
—a word that can also be translated as “sound”). The idea of voice is given physical voice; people not only listen but also generate and immerse themselves in collective sound.Footnote 59 The refrain of the poem is speech that desires to be heard and that makes itself audible even as it is a shout that assumes a listener.
The three Shofar service poems share a single style; together, they constitute an elaborate theological but also ritual experience, moving the congregation from an acclamation of sovereignty (“kingship!”) to relationship (“memory!”) to faithful bond (“voice!”). The other two examples from Yose's corpus are briefer but more elaborate. The penitential poem, “Once You Set Us at the Head” (
), has a similar structure to that of the Shofar service poems: units of paired lines, with each line containing four two-beat stichs (yielding eight stressed syllables per line). In this poem, however, the refrain (
, “we have sinned”), while still a single word, occurs only at the end of each pair of lines; and unlike the theme-words of the Shofar poems, this fixed-word stands outside the stanza's rhythmic structure. This poem has a fixed-word element, but the phrase
(“before”) punctuates the midpoint of every line rather than the end.Footnote 60 The first two-line unit, here quoted in full, provides a useful illustration of this poem's structural elements:
This poem speaks explicitly in the communal voice (“we, our”) even as it collapses the entire sacred history of Israel into a kind of collective memory, as the speaker “remembers” events from the distant past.Footnote 65 The internal refrain (or acclamation), “before,” anticipates the concluding refrain, “We have sinned.” The fixed word at the caesura would have been repeated twenty-two times, while the refrain would have occurred eleven times—frequencies which certainly could have enabled congregational participation. As performed, with congregational involvement through unified vocals, the congregation articulates a penitential juxtaposition between past (then) and present (now), as the community collectively abases itself before its ruler and seeks to inspire the deity to forgive a pattern of transgression that has corrupted Israel from, quite literally, top to bottom. The acclamation makes manifest a collective desire for pardon. It is simultaneously a confession and petition for forgiveness. Ritual effectiveness accrues through the power of the combined voices of the people.
Finally, the poem, “Truly Our Sins” (
) offers a third model for how an unrhymed acrostic composed of two-beat stichs can be constructed: each line of this poem contains only two stichs (and thus four stressed syllables per line); each line begins with the relevant letter of the alphabetical acrostic; and each unit contains four rather than two lines. The refrain is also far more elaborate. It consists of alternating units of two lines. The first complete unit—a four-line “stanza” and two-line refrain—exemplifies this structure. It states:
Following the second four-line unit (which embellishes the second letter of the alphabet, “bet”) we find the second refrain. The refrain states:
These refrains alternate, with each occurring eleven times in the course of the twenty-two units of the poem; we can envision communal participation in the alternation or in an antiphonal-choral mode of performance. Either way, these entreaties wed petitionary assertiveness with the language of acclamation. There are, furthermore, traces here of a kind of proto-rhyme, a natural consequence of the repetitions of the pronominal suffixes “our” (-nu) and “Your” (-ka). These suffixes are aesthetically pleasing, insofar as they appeal to the ear; they also repeatedly enact the relationship between congregation and deity that drives the dialogue of acclamation: we speak to You, that You may act on our behalf. The cadence and rhythm facilitate participation not just in an emotional register—imaginative sympathy for the picture being painted by the poet—but at the practical, performative level.
As these examples illustrate, Yose's poetry plays with a specific, recurring form: structural elements that include acrostics, fixed words, refrains, and marked rhythms. Within each poem, once the pattern is discerned, the format becomes quite regular and predictable, and congregational participation begins to seem natural. The affinity of these structures for acclamations, once noticed, becomes self-evident; for a community accustomed to participating in acclamations in other venues, the idea of joining in to single-word or even more elaborate congregational refrains would be organic. In the Shofar service poems, the fixed-word refrains are repeated forty-six times, while in the penitential hymn, “Once You Set Us at the Head,” the refrain “we have sinned” would have occurred at least eleven times (if the poem were complete); the more elaborate alternating refrains in “Truly Our Sins” are still less elaborate than many attested acclamations, and each occurs eleven times. The audience would have had ample opportunity to discern the structures and understand their role; the consistent overall rhythm would have provided a common baseline for formal comprehension, while the variations in acrostics, line breaks, and fixed words would have added variety to keep listeners engaged.
It is not simply the ease with which congregations may have participated in simple refrains that aligns them with acclamations, however. There is, first of all, the sense of communal identity these texts cultivate, particularly through refrains such as “we have sinned” and references to “us” and “ours.”Footnote 66 The use of the first-person plural strongly underscores the group identity of the speakers and, when spoken in the refrains, it translates idea into action. Furthermore, just as acclamations addressed the powerful—whether the emperor or a lesser magistrate—these poems explicitly address God directly, as “You.” Even the more complicated refrains of “Truly Our Sins” could be quickly learned, as they rework familiar phrases (with rich biblical resonances) that appear elsewhere in the liturgy. For example, the phrase “to defer anger” from the first refrain echoes Exod 34:6, the Thirteen Attributes of God, and its biblical reworking in Isa 48:9; and the first line of the second refrain (“For Your sake, O our God, act, and not for us”) recalls Psa 115:1 (“not for us, O Lord, not for us, but for Your Name . . .”). The refrain is constructed out of language that is not only familiar but also highly evocative, and the charge of its message amplified through the articulation of many voices in unison. The act of speaking the highly repetitive fixed-word “voice” yields an experience that is not only heard but felt: individually, in the sensation of one's mouth forming the word, and communally, in the tangible encounter with other speaking bodies and the vibrations of their speech.
In concrete ways, these poems translate and even subvert non-Jewish sources of authority even as they employ the rhetorical techniques which were commonly used to affirm it. For example, Pliny the Younger records how he and his fellow senators hailed Trajan: “One and all and all alike we acclaim his good fortune, and with it our own, and beg him to “do thus” or again “hear thus,” as if forming our requests in the sure knowledge that he will grant these.”Footnote 67
Pliny and his colleagues here praise the emperor because he has the power to hear and to do: Trajan could receive their petitions, delivered via unified acclamation, and make them reality. Such a dynamic—even the language of hearing and doing—translates seamlessly to the language and understanding of synagogue prayer. Trajan was merely an emperor (and Pliny takes pains to make clear that the emperor is dominus but not deus), a pale shadow in the rabbinic mind of the God who created the world. Furthermore, acclamation could occur whenever a critical mass gathered but seems to have been especially likely on occasions when the ruling authority was present, fostering a sense (or illusion) of intimacy even as it offered a very real opportunity to make voices heard, such as the games and specific holidays and festivals. These occasions were regarded as proper and propitious times for popular petition, complaint, and thanksgiving. The parallels with liturgical prayer, and especially the High Holy Day liturgy, are easy to draw: the people assemble to address God at a moment when God is not only present but primed to act beneficently and expecting to hear. The unified voice of his subjects in acclamation carried greater weight with an emperor or magistrate than many individual voices, and so, too, did the voice of God's people possess greater power when assembled together and underscoring the prayer-leader's voice than many voices in personal petition. As Williams notes, “A crowd that acted together, and in the process showed its strength, was not to be argued with, and it represented much that mattered in Roman politics and religion: unity, common identity, consensus, and ultimately, authority and legitimacy.”Footnote 68 A congregation participating in a performance of Yose's poetry was not striving to coerce God as a plebian crowd might attempt to intimidate a magistrate or, in Williams’ case, a bishop; but the desire to appear before God as a unified community, possessing legitimacy and dignity, might certainly have appealed instinctively as constituting a kind of persuasive power.
On a conceptual level, Jewish prayer not only asserts and embodies unity, it creates it. In terms of body language, the congregation's physical orientation towards Jerusalem fosters a sense of common Jewish identity not only within but across communities. Individual Jews direct themselves physically and mentally, knowing that they are part of a vast, diffuse diaspora that does so, as well. As Uri Ehrlich writes, “Prayer toward a single center strengthens national-religious identity, creating unity in the context of religious activity.”Footnote 69 Liturgical language and rhetoric reinforce the sense of commonality and shared identity through their routine preference for the first-person common plurals “we,” “us,” and “our,” as God is addressed both indirectly (“He”) and directly (“You”). Yose's poetry overlays acclamatory participation onto this already complex set of conceptual and performative dynamics: the dialogue between prayer-leader and congregation mimics to some extent the performance of acclamation from other venues, but the deity is the recipient of acclaim, not the prayer-leader. If anything, the prayer-leader functions more as a claque, or a liturgical version of the actor, dancer, or gladiator whose performance provides the pretext for the dialogue between ruler and subjects. The prayer-leader orchestrates the venue and creates the setting in which the people's voices are heard.
Conclusions
It is hardly a poetic accident that the third poem of Yose's Shofar service, on the sound of the shofar itself, has “voice” (לוק) as its theme word. In discussions of acclaim, the idea of “one voice” (una voce) had particular significance. In his discussion of the performance of Psalms in the liturgy, Ambrose wrote:
A psalm joins those with differences, unites those at odds, and reconciles those who have suffered offense, for who will not concede to him with whom he sings to God with a single voice (cum quo unam ad deum vocem emiserit)? Certainly it is a great bond of unity for the whole body of the people to come together in one chorus. The strings of the cithara are all different, but they bring about harmony.Footnote 70
Such holds true for the communal performance of a hymn, or the refrain of a hymn, as much as for a psalm. But whereas it was Ambrose's ecclesial authority and legitimacy that were founded on popular acclaim—support manifested in the performance of Ambrose's hymns as a kind of acclamation—in a liturgical setting, it is God's authority that is called forth, praised, and petitioned.Footnote 71 If public acclamation enabled the people to speak to those who possessed near totalitarian power, the liturgy and its poetry enabled the congregation to speak to the One who held ultimate and total power. In Yose's hymns, we find a poetic device (the fixed word) that has long been recognized as a kind of refrain. By analyzing refrains within the context of the practice of acclamation, new elements of their performative significance become audible: the voice of the people joins with the voice of the shofar to provide an irresistible, unmistakable call to the all-knowing, but also all-hearing, divine. But where public acclaim—whether civically or religiously motivated—could foster discord and instigate riots, liturgical unison yielded a distinctive and fully-audible harmony.Footnote 72
In writing about the performance of liturgical song in Milan, Augustine describes the innovative singing of hymns and psalms “in the eastern style” (Confessions 7.15).Footnote 73 Paulinus’ biography of Ambrose indicates that what Augustine understands as the “eastern mode” refers to the singing of antiphons, hymns, and vigils—precisely the kind of acclamatory poetry that was emerging in the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia in the fourth century, as dramatically recorded by Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus in their accounts of Chrysostom versus the Arians.Footnote 74 On the one hand, this Levantine style of liturgical performance seems to be bound up with the influence of acclamation on hymnography, and the transformation of liturgical poetry into a distinctive variety of acclaim. On the other hand, it also represents a new emphasis on preexisting (biblical) structures which became fruitful precisely because they suited the new aesthetic style. In short, it represents an adaptation of something very “Eastern” (biblical, Jewish) to a “Roman” (and eventually Christian) style of public experience, but also something very “Roman” to an “Eastern” liturgical sphere: a translation from East to West to East and back again.
Yose ben Yose's poems are not conventional acclamations, neither in their structure nor their use. The liturgy embellished by these compositions celebrate the deity whose presence is assumed but not manifest, and their purpose is more existential than tangible. There is not, as would be the case with an emperor, even a pretext of egalitarianism or populist power, but there is a sense of access and audibility. We have no evidence that these poems ever migrated out of the synagogue liturgy and into the world, reversing as it were the journey of acclamations from the world of theater and politics as Ambrose's hymns, so influential in ecclesial politics, did. And yet Jewish liturgical poetry such as Yose's, with its strong rhythms and cadences, unifying theme-words and refrains, and dynamic (if religiously imagined) dialogical engagement with a singular figure of significant power, strongly resembles acclamation in key ways. Reading hymns as shaped by the larger culture of acclamation helps us to understand how liturgical poetry emerged within the performative world of Late Antiquity spectacle and why it appeared simultaneously across multiple religious communities, but in distinctive ways.
At the same time, this acclamatory lens helps modern readers recognize that Jews were fully a part of the broader society of Late Antiquity. Yose's poems are, without a doubt, distinctly and explicitly Jewish; they would never be mistaken for a plebian acclamation at the races, for an Ambrosian hymn, or for a component of an anti-Arian hymnic duel. Their language (Hebrew), their performative context (the synagogue), and their frame of reference (Jewish history, texts, and traditions) single them out as uniquely Jewish works. But just as biblical Psalms resonate with ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian poetry and modern day liturgical music is colored by the 1960s folk revival, liturgical poetry in Late Antiquity drew upon the aesthetics of the surrounding culture for its sense of what was pleasing, what was effective, and what seemed (intuitively) “right.” In the case of Yose ben Yose—and other poets of his age and era, including Ephrem and Marqah, and Ambrose and Chrysostom, as well as later poets such as Narsai, Yannai, Eleazar ha-Qallir, and Romanos the MelodistFootnote 75—that context consisted, in part, of the culture of acclamation.
