A.J. Berkovitz, in A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity, takes these experiential aspects seriously and asks the question: “How did Jews encounter the Psalms?” (11). He moves the question of reception away from strictly exegetical approaches that look for a history of interpretation within a world of ideas, and towards how Jews in Late Antiquity encountered physical scrolls of psalms, how they incorporated them into their liturgical practices, and how psalms played a role in practical religion (e.g., piety and magic). The exegetical emphasis in Rabbinic literature gives the sense that the sole approach to these texts in Jewish late antiquity was through the lens of interpretation, but the Psalms had a larger life than that within this corpus. The words in the scroll were heard and spoken, the scrolls themselves were touched and handled, and they were repurposed onto amulets and magic bowls for practical and personal purposes.PaleoJudaica posts on the book are here and here.
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