Since the first partial publication of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (henceforth, the Songs) forty years ago, scholars have explained the cycle's repetitious and sonorous language as a device intended to induce intensified states of “religious” feeling or consciousness. This approach views the syntactic and grammatical anomalies of the Songs – broken syntax, odd vacillations between singular and plural forms, and in particular dense participial and nominal clusters – primarily as epiphenomena of their ritual-liturgical function. Even those who have been wary of using transhistorical categories, such as “mysticism” or “mystical experience,” to account for the formal features of Songs have nonetheless resorted to functionalist explanations when confronted with the idiosyncratic poetics of the cycle, often relying on supposed phenomenological affinities between the Songs and the hymnic material found in the Hekhalot literature.

For instance, despite taking Carol Newsom to task for applying the term “mysticism” to the Songs, Johann Maier has written that “the style of the Songs is in all their parts formalistic and stereotypical and altogether results in a very solemn and overloaded diction, ceremonious and even static, less expressing thoughts or describing events than giving a numinous impression.” Maier's characterization, thus, largely recapitulates Gershom Scholem's assessment of the later Hekhalot hymns as “the non plus ultra of vacuousness,” which was itself indebted to the assertion made by the nineteenth-century scholar Philip Bloch that the hymns “do not in the least assist in the process of thought but merely reflect emotional struggle.”