INTRODUCTION

The precise nature of Jewish liturgical expression in the period immediately preceding the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of any semblance of Jewish political independence in 70 ce is clearly of interest to a wide body of scholarship. Historians of Jewish religious practice, analysts of Christian origins, and students of the cultic forms in existence in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds all have sound reasons for seeking to reconstruct for themselves what may for the moment, pending the more accurate assessment and definition that will shortly be offered, be referred to as ‘the early liturgy of the synagogue’.

In pursuit of this reconstruction, liturgists have sometimes turned for guidance to the authoritative Jewish prayer-books of almost a thousand years later, or even of the more modern period, and sought to extrapolate backwards, making assumptions that defy the vast chasms of history, geography and ideology that separate one millennium from another. Those who have adopted such a position have transplanted some or all of the rabbinic rites and customs of tenth-century Babylon or early mediaeval Europe to first-century Judaea and the surrounding Jewish diaspora and have declined to distinguish the continuity of some liturgical traditions from the patent novelty of others. While this kind of analysis is particularly misguided in connection with the text of the liturgy, it also has its dangers in the scholarly search for the central theological concepts of Jewish liturgy, tending, as it does, to presuppose that ideas and terminology that are similar may be defined as conveying the identical religious message.