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Hekhalot literature is the name given to a group of texts which constitute the earliest known products of ancient Jewish mysticism. The texts cover a wide range of themes, such as magic, cosmology and liturgy, but their conceptual core has traditionally been taken to be Merkavah mysticism, i.e., the idea that the ultimate aim of the mystical experience is to enter the celestial palaces (היכלות heḵalot) and view God sitting on His throne. Following Ezekiel’s vision, the divine throne is depicted as a chariot (מרכבה merkaḇa). The mystical experience is essentially perceived as ascension t…

The book of Jubilees, composed in the 2nd century B.C.E., belongs to a genre known as ‘rewritten Bible’, which was widespread during the Second Temple period. It reworks the narratives of Genesis 1 to Exodus 12, highlighting legal implications of the retold events. It is a peculiar feature of Jubilees that the events narrated in it are meticulously dated and interpreted in accordance with a chronological framework based on units of seven years (called ‘weeks’) and jubilees. Jubilees was originally composed in Hebrew, and soon thereafter translated into Greek, thence to C…

The term ‘liturgy’ (< Greek λειτουργία ‘public service’) denotes the cultic use of texts as part of communal worship, regardless of their literary form, stylistic mode, or linguistic profile. Often it is the original, intended use of prayers, but it can also be applied secondarily to other sacred writings whose original purpose might have been different. Furthermore, it is also reflected to some degree in ‘literary liturgies’, i.e., prayer(-like) texts, often embedded in more comprehensive literary works, which were not necessarily performed by any community in cultic reality. All …