This chapter covers the phenomenon of piyut, which is one of the comprehensive designations of Jewish liturgical poetry and an archaeology of rabbinic tradition. The piyut's major classical and early post-classical creativity spans the fifth to eleventh centuries that originated in the Land of Israel and spread east and west. It mentions the work of Michel Foucault, ‘L'Archéologie du savoir’ and its methodological reflections on the complex relationships between the ‘things said’ in culture and the way their selection or re-combination organizes knowledge from a vast fund of data or the so-called cultural archive. The chapter uses Foucault's insights to clear some paths of approach to piyut. It also focuses on some of the ruptures and transformations of biblical and midrashic literature in the creation of liturgical epics in classical and early medieval piyut.