Poetic processes and Practices of Reading: Hodayot as Collection

• In Event: What is Commentary?

Abstract

This paper considers practices of reading and the growth of a new collection of poetry from the Dead Sea Scrolls. I use the term 'poetic process' in order to draw on the work of Peter Szondi (in his discussion of textual understand with re: to Hoderlin and Celan). The focus of attention is not the product but the productivity over time. Hodayot are carrying forward poetic processes that are already part of the very texts that we have come to call biblical. The practices of reading as writing and rewriting are an essential part of creating and building an account of ancient Jewish thinking. Additionally, there is a re-inscription of new texts from marginal to central. There is new creation of text through poetic processes. The Hodayot are a collection of poems, which reread and compose a new composition all along commenting on an integrated and now transformed past.

Author

• Hindy Najman, University of Oxford