Endnote 6 – Power to the Powerless—A Long-Lost Song of Miriam

Taking up the hints of those who have considered the Lucan Magnificat and Benedictus to be pre-Christian hymns, David Flusser has shown how this section of the War Scroll has many affinities with those two poems. (See Flusser, “The Magnificat, The Benedictus and the War Scroll,” in Judaism and the Origins of Christianity [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988], pp. 134–143. Links between the Magnificat and Benedictus and the Hodayot from Qumran have recently been proposed by M. P. Horgan and P. J. Kobelski in “The Hodayot (1QH) and New Testament Poetry,” in To Touch the Text: Biblical and Related Studies in Honor of Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., eds. Horgan and Kobelski [New York: Crossroad, 1989], pp. 179–193.) Flusser proposes that the Magnificat, the Benedictus and the section of the War Scroll may depend on a common source whose basic components would include the very sections that comparison with the new Song of Miriam now suggests. At this point the two traditions seem to overlap, those of the victory songs associated with women, and those of the victory songs in the War Scroll.