Give Ear: The Song of Moses

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Haazinu ('Give Ear', Deuteronomy 32:1-52) is almost entirely the Song of Moses, a poem calling heaven and earth to witness, recounting God's care and Israel's ingratitude and the ultimate vindication of the people. It is often read on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of return between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Haazinu's forty-three verses of poetry are set apart from the rest of the Torah by a distinctive scribal layout: Jewish law requires the Song of Moses to be copied in two narrow parallel columns, each line sitting directly beneath the one above it in a pattern the halakhic tradition calls 'tile upon tile,' and a Torah scroll in which this poem is written in ordinary prose format is considered invalid for ritual use. The same poetic material appears among the Dead Sea Scrolls in manuscripts that likewise preserve a stichographic, verse-by-verse layout, showing that the convention of setting this particular song visually apart from surrounding prose is attested centuries before the Masoretic scribal tradition that fixed it as law.