My Lips Play Flute for the Highest: Jewish Hymns and Prayers before Jesus

by Torleif Elgvin

Publisher:

Cascade Books

, 2024

Overview

My Lips Play Flute for the Highest presents fifty-five poetic texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early Jewish writings: hymns, psalms, liturgies, petitions, visions, and end-time scenarios. In psalms and prayers we may come close to the souls of ancient Judeans, who pour out their sufferings, laments, hopes, and praises to their God. We encounter a plurality of end-time hopes, with or without messianic actors on earth. Jewish piety from the last two centuries before the turn of the era emerges vibrant and powerful, but also sensitive and full of hope. Introductions to the various scrolls and writings inform readers about how scholars understand these texts and where scholarship locates them in time and space. This book provides a moving and vital entry into early Judaism, before the emergence of the Jesus movement and rabbinic Judaism.

Praise for My Lips Play Flute for the Highest

This attractive anthology of early Jewish poetic texts shows that the early Christian writings were composed against the background of Jewish society around the turn of the era. An expert in all these texts, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, Torleif Elgvin has superbly selected, presented, and introduced these texts.

——Emanuel Tov, professor of Bible, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This innovative and very worthwhile collection of texts reveals the riches of Jewish views of God and the world in the three centuries before the Roman destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Here are ancient writings that are prayerfully poignant and spiritually sonorous in modern translations that are poetically perceptive and hymnically harmonious.

——George J. Brooke, professor emeritus of biblical criticism and exegesis, University of Manchester

Product Details

• Title: My Lips Play Flute for the Highest: Jewish Hymns and Prayers before Jesus
• Author: Torleif Elgvin
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Print Publication Date: 2024
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Pages: 244
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781666770032, 9781666770025, 1666770027, 9781666770018, 1666770019, 1666770035
• Resource ID: LLS:9781666770032
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-23T00:18:03Z

About Torleif Elgvin

Torleif Elgvin is professor emeritus of biblical and Jewish studies at NLA University College, Oslo. With a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Elgvin has been involved in the official publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls since 1992. His other books include? Gleanings from the Caves, a publication of scroll fragments and artifacts from the Judean Desert in the Oslo- based Schoyen Collection, and a ground-breaking book on the Song of Songs, The Literary Growth of the Song of Songs during the Hasmonean and Early-Herodian Periods.