Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters: From Elephantine to MMT

Marvin Lloyd Miller combines a wide range of approaches to cast new light on the form and function of several ancient Jewish letters in a variety of languages. He applies a new emerging field of performance theory to texts, and argues that letters and other documents were not just read in silence, as is normal today, but were “performed,” especially when they were addressed to a community. The Performance focuses closely on the ways in which the engagement of the audience during the performance of a text might be read from traces present in the text itself.