264 CHAPTER NINEare little more than versified summaries of rabbinic halakhah and exegesis.^58
However, we have no idea how widespread thepiyyutwas in sixth century
Palestine, so its value as evidence for rabbinization is limited .Furthermore,
some recently published Aramaicpiyyutimmay provide evidence for the exis-
tence of a nonrabbinic version of the practice, though the dating and function
of these texts are for the most part unknown.^59 Be this as it may, Hebrew
piyyutimwere unquestionably performed in some synagogues, so examination
of them can enrich our understanding of the synagogues and their function-
ing .Indeed, thepiyyutcan help us reconstruct some aspects of what must
have been the kaleidoscopic reception of the synagogue art.
I will present twopiyyutimthat seem plausibly readable as reflecting the
decoration of the synagogues: first, Yannai’sqedushtafor Numbers 8, which
uses the menorah as its main conceit, and then a well-known anonymous
qinah, perhaps one of the earliestpiyyutim(following the common assump-
tion that anonymity and rhymelessness imply early date) to be constructed
around the signs of the zodiac .It should be unnecessary to add that there is
no way to prove that thesepiyyutimand others like them really were under-
stood by their audience as commenting on the synagogue art; I am, however,
suggesting that the assumption that they were explains a great deal not only
about thepiyyutimbut also about the art.^60
A few preliminary remarks about the chronology and social history of the
piyyutare in order, in part because we need to consider whether the audience
of thepiyyutis likely to have understood it at all.^61 It may be worth noting
(^58) See Rabinowitz,The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai, 1: 55–68, and in greater detail, the
same author’sHalakha and Aggada in the Liturgical Poetry of Yannai: The Sources, Language,
and Period of the Payyetan(Tel Aviv: Alexander Kohut Foundation, 1965).
(^59) See Yahalom and Sokoloff,Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry, pp .39–45 .It is furthermore
my impression that as a group the Aramaicpiyyutimare more closely linked thematically to the
synagogue art than their Hebrew counterparts .Further study of these remarkable poems may
produce more certainty.
(^60) Cf .Shinan in Fine,Sacred Realm, pp .146–48; Y .Yahalom, “The Zodiac in the Early Piyyut
in Eretz-Israel,”Mehqerei Yerushalayim Besifrut Ivrit9 (1986): 313–22.
(^61) The most sustained treatment of this question is S .Elitzur, “The Congregation in the Syna-
gogue and the Ancient Qedushta,” in S. Elizur [sic] et al., eds.,Knesset Ezra: Literature and Life
in the Synagogue, Studies Presented to Ezra Fleischer(Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1994), pp .171–
90, who confirms an old suggestion of Fleischer thatqedushta’otof the “classical” (i.e., pre-
Islamic) period tend to start with complex and allusive language and grow gradually simpler,
with complexity reemerging only in thesilluq—the poetic version of theqedushah .She follows
Fleischer in supposing that this variety of tone constitutes thepayyetanim’sattempt to appeal to
a broad audience .While preferable to the view that “everyone” could understand thepiyyut,it
still seems to me to overestimate the extent to which a large and probably mainly Hebrew-less
audience could make sense of the poems .Even the simpler stanzas assume extensive knowledge
from memory of the biblical text, not to mention the Hebrew language .The recently published
Aramaicpiyyutim, usually composed in relatively simple language with many similarities to that
of the synagogue inscriptions, are suggestive—if only more were known about their function and
dating; see Yahalom and Sokoloff,Aramaic Poems.