Biblical music reconsidered

While music itself, whether as sound or as notation, can be little more than speculation until we reach the early Middle Ages, there is a good deal of useful information in John Arthur Smith’s new book on the instruments and on the use of music in all biblical periods.

The book is arranged chronologically, starting, after an introductory chapter on ‘Background’, with the Tabernacle and the First (Solomon’s) Temple, proceeding through two chapters on the Second Temple (very sensibly named; this is not Herod’s Temple—which despite being commonly so-called was really the third—but Ezra and Nehemiah’s, the rebuilt Temple after the return from Babylonian exile), to two chapters on ‘Music in ancient Judaism elsewhere than at the Temple’, the first ritual and the second secular. After these five chapters on Jewish music, there are two on early Christianity (one covering the 1st to early 3rd centuries and the other covering the late 3rd to 4th centuries), and a final chapter on ‘Relationships and influences’.

Much of this imbalance is due to the Bible itself. There is a vast amount of information in the Old Testament on the instruments used, and both there and in the tractates of the Talmud on the Levitical and other practices, whereas there is extraordinarily little in the Gospels. Jesus and the Apostles were not conducting religious services in his lifetime because they were all Jews and in Judaism only the priesthood did so, and while the Acts and the Epistles tell us much about the growth of Christianity, they rarely tell us anything about the actual rituals used in worship, for which we have to depend on the early Fathers. In this last respect, it is a surprise that Smith seems unaware of, or at least does not refer to, Yelena Kolyada’s A compendium of musical instruments and instrumental terminology in the Bible, published initially in Russian in 2003 and in English in 2009 (reviewed in Early Music, xxxviii/2 (2010), pp.281–2), for Kolyada covers a much wider range of Patristic and cognate literature than is considered here.

Discussion of the instruments is clear and detailed, though marred somewhat in two respects, one by the rather curious system of transcription which, while avoiding the use of phonetic and diacritical symbols, manages to ignore the differences between hard and soft letters (b and v, p and ph, k and ch are each one letter, the pronunciation differing according to their position in a word, to put it over-simply, and s and sh differing in the position of a dot before or after a single letter), so that nevel appears always as nebel, and shofar, rather more confusingly, sometimes as sopar. A further annoyance in this respect is the consistent Germanic substitution of w for the letter vav, always pronounced as v—in German, of course, w is pronounced v, but not in English. The other annoyance is that Smith does not always distinguish whether a reference is a quotation (where the nevel can appear as a lute or psaltery) or his own text, where it is usually correctly a lyre, and similarly with other instruments.

Smith is less willing than Joachim Braun (Music in ancient Israel/Palestine (Grand Rapids, 2002)) to accept that the post-Exilic accounts of Temple service in Chronicles and other later biblical books are a somewhat exaggerated and aggrandized account of what went on, but he is very firm in contradicting Alfred Sendrey’s imagined Temple orchestra. Very usefully and in many places he corrects a great many of Sendrey’s inaccuracies in Music in ancient Israel (New York and London, 1969).

Smith’s Temple chapters conclude with the very sensible statement that by the beginning of the 3rd century ad (the date of the Mishna, the first part of the Talmud) or earlier, ‘the musical traditions of the Jerusalem Temple would probably have perished irrevocably’. Thus it is not surprising that many statements in this book are preceded by ‘possibly’, ‘maybe’, ‘could be’ and ‘we cannot be sure, but’. Anything that we write on biblical music is, with very few exceptions, inevitably somewhat speculative: was this instrument really that, and did they really sing or play in this way? With the rise of Christianity all round the eastern Mediterranean, we begin to get more concrete information on which branch of the Church did what, though even here ‘probably’ reappears when attempting to fill out the bare statements that survive on the early systematization of Church ritual and services. Here Smith cites most of the major texts of the first few centuries to excellent effect.

In his final chapter on the ‘Relationships and influences’ of Jewish musical practice on the Christian, Smith is quite firm that once the two religions had separated in the middle of the 1st century ad, any such relationships or influences were negligible. To start with, we have no knowledge of ancient Jewish music. We know that some Temple music was sung (why else have singers in the Temple?), but we have little certainty of what texts were sung nor of how it was done, and none at all of any scalar systems or musical styles. We may assume that biblical texts were chanted, as they still are today, but we have no idea of how this was done (the cantillation marks that we have today date from the Masoretic texts of around the 9th century ad and we have no idea of what they might have meant even as late as that—we only know the innumerable, and quite different, ways in which they were interpreted from the 19th century onwards in the synagogues of the world). We may assume, too, that prayers were chanted rather than read, for this custom of chant is a common practice in almost all religions, but once again we have no idea of how this was done. Much the same applies to early Christian practice, but here the introduction of the modes, non-existent in Jewish practice, emphasizes the total break between the two religions and the lack of any serious influences of the one on the other. Today, certainly, there is much less singing (as distinct from chanting) in the synagogue than there is in the church, for Christianity swung towards melody, culminating in all the glory of church music.

All this is excellently done here, and Music in ancient Judaism and early Christianity, a successor to Smith’s many articles on this and allied subjects, is a very useful addition to the literature on biblical music.