בין נוסח קבע לפיוט: לבירור פסקת 'אתה הכיתה' בברכת גאולה של ערבית על פי מנהג ארץ ישראל

This essay offers a new contribution to the scholarly debate on the borderline between poetry (piyyut) and prose in ancient prayers. The discussion centers around the passage Ata Hikita (‘You smote every firstborn in the Land of Egypt’) which, according to the ancient custom of Eretz Israel, is recited in the Geʼula (‘Redemption’) Benediction of the Qriat Shema section during the Maʿariv prayer, immediately after the paragraph Emmet veyatsiv (‘True and firm ... there is no God but you’). The discussion begins by showing that distinguishing between poetry and prose in prayers is a complex matter with serious ramifications and then presents several formulations of the second section of the Qriat Shema’s Ge’ula Benediction found in the Genizah, the wording of which is distinctly poetic. The linguistic and stylistic aspects of the ‘You smote’ paragraph are then discussed while comparing them to these Genizah findings and to other prose versions of the Ge’ula Benediction. The lack of distinct piyyutic characteristics, the similarity between this passage and the parallel paragraph in the Ge’ula Benediction from the Shaḥrit morning prayer, and the abundance of textual witnesses of the ‘You smote’ paragraph all point to identifying the language of this paragraph as prose. Nonetheless, its function as a prose prayer in the Palestinian Genizah communities does not necessarily point to the precedence of the ‘You smote’ paragraph as an ‘original’ prose version of the Ge’ula Benediction, and the difficulty in definitively categorizing it is indicative more than anything of the indistinct boundary between prose and poetry in the liturgy.