1. All Aramaic texts examined in this paper are taken from the critical edition of JPA poetry from the Cairo Genizah: Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff, Shirat bene ma‘aravah: Shirim ’aramiyim shel yehude ’Ereẓ Yisra'el ba-tekufah ha-bizantit (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities, 1999). Text and line numbers refer to the numeration in that edition. Menachem Kister's important review, “Jewish Aramaic Poems from Byzantine Palestine and Their Setting,” Tarbiz 75 (2007): 105–184Google Scholar, constitutes an important supplement to the volume.

2. Valerie M. Hope, Roman Death: The Dying and the Dead in Ancient Rome (London: Continuum, 2009), 77–78. The gendered aspects of laudatio and nenia will resonate with Jewish eulogies and laments, in that norms of mourning were deeply gendered in antiquity, and ritual forms of lamentation not only reflected these conventions but cultivated and reinforced them. The bibliography on gender and funerary customs in Greco-Roman culture is extensive, but of particular interest, see Ann Suter, ed., Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), esp. 10–14, 42–44, and 102–108; Hans van Wees, “A Brief History of Tears: Gender Differentiation in Archaic Greek,” in When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon (London: Routledge, 2013), 10–53; Thomas Habinek, The World of Roman Song: From Ritualized Speech to Social Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), esp. 233–252; and Darja Šterbenc Erker, “Women's Tears in Ancient Roman Ritual,” in Tears in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Thorsten Fögen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 135–160.

3. Judith Evans-Grubbs, Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine's Marriage Legislation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 82–84.

4. On city and communal laments in the Hebrew Bible, see particularly the monographs by F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1993) and Paul Wayne Ferris, The Genre of Communal Lament in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).

5. Alexiou, Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 83–90.

6. The greatest concentration of eulogies in the Talmud occurs in B. Mo‘ed Katan 24b–28b, where many rules concerning funerals are delineated. In this section of text, one can find the condolence speech improvised by the third-century Palestinian Amora Yehudah ben Naḥmani during his visit to Ḥiyya bar Abba after the death of Ḥiyya's son; the eulogy for Rabbah bar Huna and Hamnuna Saba (fourth-century Babylonian Amoraim); and the model eulogy composed by the orator Bar Kipok (fourth-century Babylonia) when asked by Ashi, “How will you eulogize me when I die?” See David Kraemer, The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism (London: Routledge, 2000).

7. This phrasing, of course, alludes to J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), one of the foundational works in performance theory. The bibliography on ritual and performance theory is substantial, but key works influential to the present study, in terms of both performance and the gendered elements thereof, include Richard D. McCall, Do This: Liturgy as Performance (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Hans Schilderman, ed., Discourse in Ritual Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2007); John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1988) and Between Theory and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); and Ronald L. Grimes, The Craft of Ritual Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Among the works most directly relevant to the material treated here are Susan Letzer Cole, The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1985) and Donovan J. Ochs, Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol, and Ritual in the Greco-Roman Era (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1993).

8. On modes of performance in piyyutim, see Lieber, Laura, “The Rhetoric of Participation: The Experiential Elements of Early Hebrew Liturgical Poetry,” Journal of Religion 90, no. 2 (2010): 119–147Google Scholar. With regard to the physicality of Jewish prayer in antiquity, Uri Ehrlich, The Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy, trans. Dena Ordan, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 105 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004) remains the most creative and significant study.

9. Aad de Jong, “Liturgical Action from a Language Perspective about Performance and Performatives in Liturgy,” in Schilderman, Discourse in Ritual Studies, 113.

10. Grimes, Craft of Ritual Studies, 294.

11. The Yahalom-Sokoloff volume contains sixteen eulogy-poems (hespedim). It is important to note that in tannaitic times, the term hesped sometimes referred not specifically to the eulogy but rather, more generally, to the funerary rites and the rituals of conveying the deceased to the burial; see Pinchas Mandel, “‘Ve-ha-ḥay yiten ’al libo’: ‘Al minhagei hesped ve-tanḥumim be-Bavel u-v-'Ereẓ Yisra'el be-tekufat ha-talmud,” in Meḥkarim be-talmud u-ve-midrash: Sefer zikaron le-Tirẓah Lifshiẓ, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher, Joshua Levinson and Berakhyahu Lifshitz (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2005), 385–410. See also the discussion of the funerary oration in B. Shabbat 105b and minor tractate Semaḥot 3:4–6.

12. Alexiou notes, “[T]he religious laments of the early church show considerable experimentation with form” (Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 142) and the same can be said of the JPA poems.

13. Dennis Edwin Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2003), 40–42.

14. One poem contains the heading, “Let them stand in rows; one then says the eulogy and after that says [this poem]” (poem 66). This suggests the ritual context in which this poem, and others, were used, either when originally written or in adaptation to rituals that subsequently developed; the practice accords with that described in M. Mo‘ed Katan 3:7 and Semaḥot 10:8–9 and 11:3. On Jewish funerary practices in late antiquity, see Deborah A. Green, “Sweet Spices in the Tomb: An Initial Study of the Use of Perfume in Jewish Burials,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context: Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah A. Green (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 145–176.

15. See, for example, Seneca, In Consolation to His Mother Helvia; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, bk. 3 (“On Grief”); Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, bk. 3; and Plutarch, Consolation to His Wife (Mor. 608B–612B).

16. For an overview of rabbinic engagement with non-Jewish philosophical thought, although not without its flaws, see Henry A. Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1973); more recently, note the articles collected in Martin Goodman, ed., Jews in a Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

17. Yahalom and Sokoloff, Shirat bene ma‘aravah, 25.

18. Rabbinic sources indicate the use of antiphonal mourning liturgies; see Sifrei Devarim 305, Niẓavim-Va-yelekh, pis. 2, to Deuteronomy 31:14 (ed. Finkelstein, pp. 326–327), in which God and the angels mourn Aaron: God “stands in eulogizing” (‘omed be-hesped) and the angels “answer after Him” (‘onim ’aḥarav) by citing Malachi 2:6 (or it may be that God recites the “a” part of the verse and the angels respond with the “b” part); see Mandel, “Ve-ha-ḥay yiten ’al libo,” 386. The range of practices available to Jews in late antiquity should be noted. As Alexiou notes in regard to non-Jewish mourning rituals: “In ancient literature, the lament is presented in a variety of forms: with a soloist, accompanied by chorus only in the refrain; with a chorus alone; with one or more soloists and a chorus, singing antiphonally; and finally, in the form of an imagined dialogue between living and dead” (Ritual Lament, 131).

19. Vayikra Rabba, Vayikra, par. 4:5, to Leviticus 4:2 (ed. Margoliot 1:87–91).

20. The Yahalom-Sokoloff edition includes nine laments (kinot).

21. Anamnesis is the term arising in Christian eucharistic theology for the idea of “remembrance,” in particular that the eucharistic rites are done “in remembrance of” Jesus's actions at the Last Supper. More generally speaking, the term can be used to describe any past event that is re-experienced in the present through ritual, including the Exodus from Egypt at a Passover seder or the giving of the Torah at Sinai on a routine Shabbat. See Lieber, “Rhetoric of Participation.” The term for memory (zekher, zikkaron) in Hebrew can have similar resonances, as it connotes a sense of immediacy lacking from the more neutral and abstract term “history.” See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 6–26.

22. Even the deaths of Adam and Eve—the only deaths that might have seemed something other than foreordained—are presented without significant editorializing in the eulogies where they are mentioned, which makes them important counterpoints to the confrontation between Moses and Adam in poem 40, discussed below.

23. Other narrative kinot include #18 (which delineates Israel's history of failure, moral and ritual). Poem 25 also appears to be a narrative (describing the mourning of the ancestors of Israel at the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem), but only the first nine lines are extant; the existing stanzas narrate the responses of Abraham (ll. 6–7) and Sarah (ll. 8–9).

24. The Talmud Yerushalmi recounts (Ta‘anit 4:6 [68d–69a]): “The [Romans] went on killing [Jews] until a horse was sunk in blood up to its nose. And the blood was turning over forty-se'ah boulders, until the blood flowed forty Roman miles into the sea. . . . The evil Hadrian had a large vineyard, eighteen Roman miles by eighteen Roman miles, the dimension of the distance from Tiberias to Sepphoris. They surrounded it with a wall made of the victims of Beitar as high as a man and his extended arms. And he did not decree that they may be buried until a different king arose and decreed that they might be buried.”

25. Lit., “the judgment You collected,” but the specific language of “debt” is better in English.

26. It is worth noting that in biblical Hebrew, an image of particular ferocity is the bereaved mother bear; see 2 Samuel 17:8, Hosea 3:8, and Proverbs 17:12.

27. The Aramaic here (shilhavun nura’) echoes Song 8:6 ('esh shalhevetyah).

28. From Song of Songs 5:2.

29. In Roman declamation, tears served an important function, what Erik Gunderson describes as “rhetorical and declamatory tears.” At the same time, stoic self-restraint in the face of loss was also seen as laudable. See Erik Gunderson, Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97–100.

We should note, however, that tears serve many functions in ancient rituals, including the theurgic power to motivate the deity, and this may lie behind the fact that earlier in this same poem, the ancestors “wept with all their hearts / and sought mercy from their Father” (l. 4). See Fögen, Tears in the Graeco-Roman World and Michael A. Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 177–182, who describes this phenomenon as “divine activation.”

30. The latter phrase echoes Psalm 147:2.

31. In Eichah Rabbah, Petiḥta 24 (ed. Buber [Vilna: Romm, 1899], 14a–b), God desires to weep over the destruction of the temple, but the angels protest (apparently considering such behavior undignified), so God retreats into his “secret place” in order to grieve. For a discussion of God's weeping and rabbinic responses to biblical suggestions of such behavior, see Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 160–190, esp. 170–172. The association between extreme grief and the destruction of the temple connects these midrashim to the kinot examined here.

32. Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking, 164–167. Also note Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Ha-kol kol ’aḥoti: Demuyot nashim u-semalim nashiyim be-midrash ’Eichah Rabbah,” in 'Eshnav le-ḥayehen shel nashim be-ḥavarot yehudiot: Koveẓ meḥkarim ben-teḥumi, ed. Yael Atzmon (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1995), 95–111; an English language version of this piece appeared as “The Social Context of Folk Narratives in the Aggadic Midrash: The Feminine Power of Laments, Tales, and Love,” in The Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 108–129.

33. The prominence of Adam within the literary tradition of eulogies, as well as in this poem, is noteworthy, as—broadly speaking—the exegetical traditions in Judaism tend to emphasize “Jewish” figures (the patriarchs, prophets, Lady Zion, etc.). It may be, in part, that the authors of the “historical” hespedim, akin to the Avodah piyyutim for Yom Kippur, found it sensible or appealing to start at the beginning of human history. (For an excellent introduction to the genre of Avodah poems, along with bilingual editions of the most important early texts, see Michael Swartz and Joseph Yahalom, Avodah: Ancient Poems for Yom Kippur [University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005].) But as poem 40 suggests, the rationale for connecting Adam (and Eve) to mourning poems reflects the idea that, in addition to being the first human beings to live, they were also the first to die. Intriguingly, we possess midrashim that depict God lamenting the fate of Adam; see, for example, Bereshit Rabbah, Bereshit, par. 21:4, to Genesis 3:22 (Theodor-Albeck, 1:200), which states: “Having sent him [Adam] away, He began lamenting [מקונן] him, saying: ‘Behold, the man was as one of us' [Genesis 3:22]!” (Also note the discussion of “lamenting” midrashim in Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 130–145; and midrashim on the acquisition of mortality in Judith R. Baskin, “‘She Extinguished the Light of the World’: Justifications for Women's Disabilities in Abot de-Rabbi Nathan B,” in Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, ed. Carol Bakhos (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 277–298. In Greek and Syriac Christian hymnography, poems about the life of Adam (emphasizing his responsibility for and experience of mortality, punishments that are undone by Jesus, the second Adam) are quite common.

34. This piyyut serves as a kind of answer to the philosophical musings of poem 65, which asks, “Do we have the strength to speak? / What can a servant say to his master?” (ll. 4–5). It also suggests that the resignation that accompanies the death of Adam and Eve in the “historical” eulogies may not have always been so readily accepted—Moses's bristling at suffering for an ancestor's sin here gives voice to a more general question the eulogies leave unanswered, which is simply, “Why? Why must we die?”

35. Alexiou notes that dialogue, “usually in the form of a swift exchange of question and answer,” was common in epigrams and funerary inscriptions (Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 138). The rapid exchange between Moses and Adam resembles the examples Alexiou cites.

The poet here may pick up on the wordplay on the root ‘-ẓ-b in Genesis 3:15–16 (God's words to the woman and the man) and Genesis 6:5 (God's grief over the behavior of His creation), which suggests that “being like God” means to know sorrow and disappointment.

36. Perhaps the best non-Jewish comparand for this poem comes from Greek Byzantine hymnography, in Romanos's kontakion on “Mary at the Cross”; in this text, Mary argues against the philosophical acceptance of Christ's death as they process to his crucifixion. She articulates the emotional, “feminine” way of grieving while Jesus expresses restrained, intellectual, “masculine” grief. For the text of this Romanos hymn, see Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, eds., Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 142–149 (text #19). For a study of the Romanos hymn in the larger context of late ancient hymnography, see Laura S. Lieber, “On the Road with Mater Dolorosa: An Exploration of Maternal-Filial Discourse in Performance,” The Journal of Early Christian Studies 24, no. 2 (forthcoming).

37. It is worth noting here that Moses's masculinity—his virility—is singled out in the biblical “eulogy” for him in Deuteronomy 34:7, where we are told that despite being 120 years old, “his eye had not dimmed nor his vigor [lit., moistness, i.e., sexual potency] abated.”

38. Yahalom and Sokoloff identify this work as a parody of a Ninth of Av lament; see the “Introduction,” Shirat bene ma‘aravah, 28–33.

39. Ophir Münz-Manor, “Carnivalesque Ambivalence and the Christian Other in Aramaic Poems from Byzantine Palestine,” in Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfil et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 831–845. It is worth noting that ten men—the number of Zeresh's sons—constitute the numerical minimum for a “community.”

40. Among the phrases which most strongly recollect characterizations of Zion and personified Israel are those that echo Lamentations 1: “Bereft of all my kin / I sit” (l. 36); “only I remain, solitary” (l. 39); “exalted was I / over maidservants and slaves” (l. 40); and “Bereft of even a corner / I sit” (l. 42).

Münz-Manor notes the resonance between Zeresh's language in lines 34–35 and Psalm 22, which in Christian tradition includes Jesus's lament on the cross (“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”) but in Jewish tradition is understood as Esther's lament. Zeresh, as a parody of Mary and a “victim” of both Haman and Esther, further complicates the interpretation of this psalm.

41. The first “cursed be Haman” (l. 4) is in Hebrew; the second, in line 24, is in Aramaic.

42. E. D. Goldschmidt, Seder ha-kinot le-Tisha be-'Av (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1968).

43. Andromache Karanika, “Greek Comedy's Parody of Lament,” in Suter, Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond, 181–198; and Evangelos Karakasis, Terence and the Language of Roman Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially pp. 91–98. Thematically, perhaps the best analogue to the Jewish Purim poem is a roughly contemporary Christian hymn for Easter: Romanos's konakion “On the Resurrection IV,” in which Hades is abused, deserted, and judged in hell just as Jesus was on earth. For the text, see Maas and Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina, 201–209 (text #27), especially strophes 8–10.

44. Alexiou, Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 10–14. See, too, Gail Labovitch, “Teach Your Daughters Wailing: Mishnah Moed Qatan 3:8–9 and the Gendering of Tannaitic Funeral Practice” (paper presented at the AJS conference, 2013).

45. Grimes, Craft of Ritual Studies, 297.

46. The existence of metrical epitaphs in Jewish funerary contexts, in both Greek and Latin, suggests a certain fluidity of the genres of funerary poem and epitaph. See the discussion of metrical epitaphs in Pieter Willem van der Horst, Ancient Jewish Epitaphs: An Introductory Survey of a Millennium of Jewish Funerary Epigraphy (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1991), especially pp. 45–54; and van der Horst, “Jewish Tomb Inscriptions in Verse,” in Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy, ed. Jan Willem van Henten and Pieter Willem van der Horst (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 129–147.

47. Anthony Corbeill, Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially chapter 3, “Blood, Milk and Tears: The Gestures of Mourning Women” (67–106). Following on Corbeill, Dorota Dutsch adds “Certainly, as women in charge of the nurturing of the ‘new-dead,’ the praeficae (female professional mourners, who uttered the nenia) would have performed duties reminiscent of those of nurses” (Dorota Dutsch “Nenia: Gender, Genre, and Lament in Ancient Rome,” in Suter, Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond, 263). On the particular efficacy of female mourning, see the discussion in Hasan-Rokem, “Ha-kol kol ’aḥoti.”

It is also worth noting that male declaimers were trained to perform the roles of women grieving. In the ancient rhetorical handbooks (progymnasmata), one of the popular exercises for the technique of speech-in-character (ethopoiia) was “What would Niobe say when her children lie dead before her.” See Libanius's Progymnasmata: Model Exercises in Greek Prose Composition and Rhetoric, trans. Craig A. Gibson (Atlanta: SBL, 2008), 381–385; and on the transference of this concern and technique into Greek hymnography, see Kalish, Kevin, “Imagining What Eve Would Have Said after Cain's Murder of Abel: Rhetorical Practice and Biblical Interpretation in an Early Byzantine Homily,” The Bridgewater Review 31 (2012): 4–7Google Scholar (available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol31/iss2/4). It is entirely plausible that Jewish poets would have likewise adapted this kind of exercise—not necessarily directly but rather in a more informal way—to describe Zion mourning her children.

48. Note that even in preexilic times, female mourners (mekonenot) were known in Israelite culture; see Jeremiah 9 (esp. vv. 16–19).

49. Gunderson, Declamation, Paternity, and Roman Identity, 97.

50. CIJ II no. 1530; an English translation is available in Margaret H. Williams, The Jews among the Greeks and Romans: A Diasporan Sourcebook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 127. See, too, William Horbury, “Jewish Inscription and Jewish Literature in Egypt, with Special Reference to Ecclesiasticus,” in van Henten and van der Horst, Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy, 9–43.