The Politics of Provocation: Participation and Protest in Israel

The hymns include praise of the deity and voces magicae, words that have no semantic meaning, but draw attention to sounds of letters in God’s name. Since God’s name is used to create the world, the sounds of the name are creative, but the Name cannot be spoken. The hymns create a multiplicity of Name-equivalents, words that have the functional status of the divine Name and which can be employed in ritual. Voces magicae are not so much nonsense as they are logical extensions of the linguistic theory. The final chapter surveys recent theories of ritual language and then uses the conclusions from the study to refine the general issue of the relationship between the semantic meaning of words and their ritual efficacy.