We tend to take the activity of reading for granted. However, as historians of the book and its readers have shown, engaging with a text is a multi-layered event conditioned by material reality and contingent upon socio-cultural inflected reading practices. This seminar combines such insights with textual and material evidence for the reception of the Psalms to reframe aspects of the study of late ancient Judaism and early Christianity. It will explore how the scroll and codex shaped Jewish and Christian material reception and imagination of the Psalms; question the primacy of scholarly exegesis in reconstructing the lived encounter with Scripture; and suggest a model for Jewish-Christian interaction that moves beyond learned scriptural polemic. The seminar synthesizes several strands of argument found in Berkovitz's recently published book, A Life of Psalms in Jewish
Late Antiquity.