staircase with fifteen steps led out of the court of the Israelitish men (עזרת ישראל) down into the court of the women (עזרת נשׁים), and upon these fifteen steps, which correspond to the fifteen gradual Psalms, the Levites played musical instruments on the evening of the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles in connection with the joyful celebration of the water-drawing,[1] and above them in the portal (upon the threshold of the Nicanor-gate or Agrippa-gate)[2] stood two priests with trumpets. It has been said that this is a Talmudic fable invented on behalf of the inscription שׁיר המעלות, and that the fifteen steps are not out of Eze 40:26, Eze 40:31 by reading the two verses together. This aspersion is founded on ignorance. For the Talmud does not say in that passage that the fifteen Psalms have taken their name from the fifteen steps; it does not once say that these Psalms in particular were read aloud upon the fifteen steps, but it only places the fifteen steps on a parallel with the fifteen Psalms; and, moreover, interprets the name שׁיר המעלות quite differently, viz., from a legend concerning David and Ahithophel, Succa 53a, Maccoth 11a (differently rendered in the section Chelek of the tractate Sanhedrin in the Jerusalem Talmud). This legend to which the Targum inscription relates (vid., Buxtorf, Lex. Talmud. s.v. קפא) is absurd enough, but it has nothing to do with the fifteen steps. It is not until a later period that Jewish expositors say that the fifteen Psalms had their name from the fifteen steps.[3]
Even Hippolytus must have heard something similar when he says (p. 190, ed. Lagarde): πάλιν τε αὐτοῦ εἰσί τινες τῶν ἀναβαθμῶν ᾠδαί, τὸν ἀριθμὸν πεντεκαίδεκα, ὅσοι καὶ οἱ ἀναβαθμοὶ τοῦ ναοῦ, τάχα δελοῦσαι τάς ἀναβάσεις περιέχεσθαι ἐν τῷ ἑβδόμῳ καὶ ὀγδόῳ ἀριθμῷ, upon which Hilary relies: esse autem in templo gradus quindecim historia
- ↑ Vid., my Geschichte der jüdischen Poesie, S. 193f.
- ↑ It was called the Nicanor-gate in the Temple of Zerubbabel, and the Agrippa-gate in the Temple of Herod: in both of them they ascended to its threshold by fifteen steps; vid., Unruh, Das alte Jerusalem und seine Bauwerke (1861), S. 137, cf. 194.
- ↑ Lyra in his Postillae, and Jacob Leonitius in his Hebrew Libellus effigiei templi Salomonis (Amsterdam 1650, 4to), even say that the Levites sang one of the fifteen songs of degrees on each step. Luther has again generalized this view; for his rendering “a song in the higher choir” is intended to say, cantores harum odarum stetisse in loco eminentiori (Bakius).
