Where Sound and Meaning part: Language and Performance in Early Hebrew Poetry

This chapter addresses the discrepancies between writing, reading, listening, and performing in two Jewish genres: biblical verse and early synagogue poetry. The continuities (scriptural canonicity, diglossia, tensions between constraint and play) are obvious. The poetics, by contrast, difffer. If we want to understand this variance, we must examine what happens in the dialogue between the scribe and his empty scroll, between the cantor and his perplexed congregation. How did they juggle the disparate privileges of sound and meaning, of private understanding and communal experience? As we shall see, in the silence that preceded the sound, and in the sound that followed, the poet’s inner and outer speech articulated diffferent poetics – sometimes disrupting, sometimes reinforcing the conventions of the holy Hebrew tongue