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The Yom Kippur poems begin with an invocation to the Creator, rehearse the history of Israel from the Creation forward, then turn to the preparation of the High Priest, the performance of the sacrifices, and the successful conclusion of the rite of Atonement.

Much of the poets' art involved finding new yet communicative ways to name and invoke biblical and natural matters. For example, "Those aware of good and evil" is a trope for Adam and Eve. Cain is called "The child of thieves." "That which He holds in the hollow of His hand" is water. The technique, called kinnui in Hebrew, resembles Icelandic bardic kennings like "mother of ice" for water.

There is an unvoiced melody in the Talmudic literature that flows from the evenness of its temper, the gravity of disputation, and its resistance to any final disposition. It's found in the suggestion that when painting a wall, some part must be left uncovered, as a token that the Creation is not yet finished.

The divergent approaches to familiar figures in these poems endow the old stories with the power of new prospects. The seminal, epical, and anonymous Az Be-'En Kol ("When All Was Not") portrays the boor (Adam) and the arouser (Eve) as rude and ignorant, rather than as the flawed perfections of the Zohar or, more familiarly, Paradise Lost:

They did not sleep
one night in honor,
for the one who is like a beast
did not understand honor.

They were expelled from Eden
to devour food in sweat,
for pleasure
is not fitting for a fool.

Another unattributed poem, Atah Konanta 'Olam Me-Rosh ("You Established the World from the Beginning"), approaches the same material from the other side of the Divine, the side of mercy:

You formed from the earth
a lump of soil in Your image
and commanded him
concerning the tree of life.

He forsook Your word
and he was forsaken from Eden
But You did not destroy him
for the sake of the work of Your hands.

Three of the poems in this volume were written by Yose ben Yose, a 5th-century payetan (poet). Azkir Gevurot Elohah ("Let Me Recount the Wonders of God") prods the memory of the congregation:

When the Lord conceived,
when God invented,
He consulted but none could prevent Him,
He spoke and none constrained Him.

He speaks and fulfills,
decrees and enacts,
He is strong enough to support it [the world]
heroic enough to bear it.

Atah Konanta 'Olam be-Rov Hesed ("You Established the World in Great Mercy"), another complete Avodah by Yose ben Yose, speaks directly to God on behalf of Israel. It reminds the Creator that the world "will not shatter / … and will not collapse / from the weight of transgression and sin." The poem then points to the Torah, and recalls that

While the earth was still
desert and wasteland,
You amused Yourself with the glow of the Law,
and it frolicked at Your feet.

The sublime in literature, rare in English poetry outside Blake and Milton (though Shelley hits it in "Ozymandias"), abounds in these ancient Jewish poems. And not only in paraphrases of the Creation, or as in a Psalm where the mountains skip like rams. A long passage in the Az Be-'En Kol describes the vestments of the High Priest, the heir of Aaron. Every stone on the breastplate is expounded as a tribe of Israel. After donning the breastplate, the priest who is to conduct the sacrifices of atonement

… put on the sash,
like a belt on his loins,
to cleave the place of fire
to the Fire Consuming Fire.

He wore it on top of it,
Like a dressing for a wound
to wear over a ruin
as vast as the sea.

It was hollow
and made of embroidered work
to revive our hollow corpses
and to stop our slaying.

He girded himself
and concealed its end inside,
like the rivers that go around,
ending at the sea.

"The place of fire" is a metonym for Israel; the "Fire Consuming Fire" is God; the "ruin vast as the sea" is Jerusalem. I can't think of another poem in any language which does so much with a belt on a robe.

Laurance Wieder is the author most recently of Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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