Observations On The Relationship Between Jpa Poetry And The Hebrew Piyyut Tradition The Case Of The Kinot

Abstract

This chapter sketches the development of the Hebrew poetic tradition of writing dirges lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, as it developed from the Bible onward. It compares Hebrew poetic tradition with another (related) Jewish poetic tradition that represented by poems written in the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic dialect, during the Late Antique period. Both the kerovot and kinot show the typical features of Qillirian (Classical piyyut) language: profusion of poetic epithets, non-standard morphology and syntax, and general avoidance of Greek and Latin loanwords. The morphological idiosyncrasies of the Hebrew piyyut are entirely absent from the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) lament poems, as well as from the rest of the corpus assembled by Yahalom and Sokoloff. Strictly speaking, of course, the fact that the two traditions employ two different languages makes a direct comparison illegitimate. Keywords: Hebrew Bible; Hebrew piyyut; Jerusalem; Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) lament poems; kerovot; kinot