374 CE. The Kedushah as a Theological Battlefield

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.

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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 congregational declaration of the holiness of God, built around the verse in Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts,” and a parallel line from Ezekiel 3:12. Embedded in the repetition of the Amidah, the standing prayer that is central to all Jewish services, it requires communal participation and takes the form of a call-and-response between the prayer leader and the congregation.

For Christians, the same words carried a radically different weight. The Isaiah-derived chant, also known as the Sanctus in the Latin West, had entered Christian liturgy as a trinitarian formula. From the Jewish perspective, the verse in Isaiah proclaimed the transcendent unity and unrivaled holiness of the God of Israel, a reading fundamentally incompatible with Christian trinitarianism. The same text, the same Hebrew words, carried opposite theological content depending on whose lips were moving.

Under Byzantine rule, this was not merely a theological dispute. It had political and legal consequences. As Christianity became entrenched as the religion of the Roman Empire, imperial and ecclesiastical authorities in Palestine periodically moved to restrict Jewish worship they considered provocative or potentially anti-Christian. The formal, public Kedushah recited during the Amidah repetition attracted particular suspicion, since its structure as a congregational declaration made it most visible and most audible to outside observers, and most obviously a rival to Christian liturgical practice.

Eventually, Byzantine authorities suppressed the Kedushah before the Torah reading in Palestinian synagogues. Jewish communities responded with a characteristic act of survival and ingenuity. They preserved the essential content of the Kedushah by relocating it into the Uva le-Zion [And from Tzion…] prayer. In this context, the verses from Isaiah and Ezekiel were not recited as formal liturgical declarations but embedded within a passage of scriptural study, accompanied by their Aramaic translations, the Targum literature. Framed as learning rather than proclamation, this less formal version of the prayer, referred to as the Kedushah DeSidra [Kedushah of the Order (of study)], could evade the prohibition. The coercive authorities were offered the face-saving fiction that these were study verses, not a rival sanctification of God.

This fits into a strategy in which late antique Jewish communities throughout Palestine developed liturgical strategies to preserve forms of worship under pressure, often by embedding contested elements within the protective cover of Torah study or translation. The Aramaic Targum insertions in the Uva le-Zion prayer are, in this reading, not merely pedagogical aids for an Aramaic-speaking population but encoded resistance, a means of continuing to speak theological truths that could no longer be spoken aloud in their original liturgical form. What is also remarkable is the durability of the arrangement. Once established, the Uva le-Zion form traveled from Palestine to Babylon, where it was adopted despite the absence of external pressures, suggesting that communities elsewhere recognized in it something more than an expedient wartime compromise. The Palestinian workaround became a Babylonian standard, and through the Babylonian Geonic tradition it passed into universal Jewish practice down to the present day, so that worshippers reciting Uva le-Zion now rarely suspect that its structure encodes a memory of imperial censorship in the synagogues of Byzantine Palestine.

Sources and Further Reading

Elbogen, Ismar. Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993.

Epiphanius of Salamis. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I (Sects 1–46). Translated by Frank Williams. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008.

Langer, Ruth. “Explaining Liturgical Anomalies: Evaluating Jacob Mann’s ‘Changes in the Divine Service.'” In Jacob Mann: A Centennial Review, edited by Stefan C. Reif and Richard S. Sarason, 93–114. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025.

Mann, Jacob. “Changes in the Divine Service of the Synagogue Due to Religious Persecutions.” Hebrew Union College Annual 4 (1927): 241–310.

Reif, Stefan C. Judaism and Hebrew Prayer: New Perspectives on Jewish Liturgical History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.