JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

374 CE. The Kedushah as a Theological Battlefield

The three-fold sanctification of God drawn from Isaiah 6.3 served as a flashpoint between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. Both communities incorporated the verse into their central worship, but with irreconcilable theological meanings: Jews proclaimed God’s absolute unity, Christians read it as witness to the Trinity. Byzantine authorities moved to suppress the Jewish Kedushah in Palestine. As a way around this prohibition, worshippers embedded it in a study passage, a workaround that gave rise to the prayer Uva le-Zion, still recited daily today.

When Epiphanius completed his Panarion between 374 and 377 CE, he did so as a man deeply formed by the land in which he had grown up. Born in Judea around 310–320 CE, he had lived among both Jewish and Christian communities in Palestine before becoming bishop of Salamis in Cyprus. In cataloguing what he regarded as the heresies of his age, he produced the earliest datable external witness to the Jewish Kedushah prayer as a point of controversy between Jews and Christians. The Panarion reveals a world in which the same words from Isaiah 6:3 had become a theological battlefield, with both communities claiming ownership and each repudiating the other’s reading.

The Kedushah is one of Judaism’s most ancient liturgical structures. In its full form, it involves a........

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