jan 1, 75 BC - Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice

Description:

The nine manuscripts (4Q400-407, 11Q17) of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (= "Shirot Olat Ha-Shabbat," or "Shirot") range in date between 75 BC and 50 CE. (An additional, contemporary manuscript was discovered at Masada.)

The Shirot are a collection of thirteen songs associated with the angelic praise of God on the Sabbath. While the Shirot do not contain the words of angelic praise, they do describe the manner of this praise, and are thus conducive to a communal mystical experience of the heavenly Temple and the angelic worship of the God of Israel. The repeated description of the angels as priests fits the priestly and purity-concerned context of the Dead Sea Scrolls sectarian community. The collection, however, could have an earlier, pre-sectarian provenance, stemming from a disaffected priestly group, which would have made the text an applicable piece of literature for the sectarin community, much the way the Enochic literature and Aramaic Levi Document were.

Image: 4Q400 (ShirShabb^d) frag. 1 col. ii. N.B., the beginning of the song for the eighth sabbath is about half way down the image, and starts "lammaskil" = "For the Maskil [Instructor]"

Full image:
https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/explore-the-archive/image/B-499635

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