The Liturgical Communion of the Yaḥad with the Angels

What is it about?

Since the discoveries of the first Dead Sea Scrolls 70 years ago, the motif of a communion with the angels has been repeatedly emphasized and discussed as a characteristic of the self-understanding of the community behind these writings. Now that all the Dead Sea Scrolls have been published and several studies on these writings with a view towards this topic have already been written, preliminary conclusions can be drawn for the liturgical understanding of the community as well as for the contextualization of the different compositions inside this collection, especially of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q400–407; 11Q17; and Mas1k ShirShabb). However, the origin of the so-called Angelic Liturgy is still an unresolved question in scholarship. No comparable composition from early Judaism has survived in terms of content and form, which makes it difficult to judge the broader context in which it was written. We will try to figure out the relationship of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice to the sectarian literature by analyzing the communion with the angels described therein. I will demonstrate that this composition has the most explicit connections to the liturgical communion with the angels that is uniquely found in undisputed sectarian literature. The Angelic Liturgy is then not so much the source, but much more an example of the liturgical development inside the yaḥad.

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