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PSALMING

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This Friday night at TOV we are having Eden to Eden back! One of the things they are known for is their psalming. Psalming has a rich past in devotional and spiritual meditation to Yahweh. Hebrew psalming is a type of cantillation1, the Hebrew term te’amim describes the manner of reciting or singing verses from the Bible and specifically in this case, the Psalms.2 It is becoming more popular in organic praise and worship settings and is often connected with inviting the Holy Spirit to indwell the natural spontaneity of devotional and meditational song.

In Hebrew there are special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic Text of the Bible, to complement the letters and vowel points. These marks are known in English as ‘accents’ (diacritics), ‘notes’ or trope symbols3. The musical motifs associated with the signs are known in Hebrew as niggun or neginot.4

There are multiple traditions of cantillation. Within each tradition, there are multiple tropes, typically for different books of the Bible and often for different occasions. For example, different chants may be used for Torah readings on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur than for the same text on a normal Shabbat.

In Evangelical Christianity cantillation is known mostly when Bible verses are restated in modern praise and worship music and are simply referred to as praise and worship songs. However, when these songs literally reiterate scripture, they certainly should be considered  te’amim.

Phonetics

Most cantillation signs are written on the consonant of the stressed syllable of a word. This also shows where the most important note of the musical motif should go.5

A few signs always go on the first or last consonant of a word. This may have been for musical reasons, or it may be to distinguish them from other accents of similar shape. For example, pashta, which goes on the last consonant, otherwise looks like kadma, which goes on the stressed syllable.6

Music

Cantillation signs guide the reader in applying a chant to Biblical readings. This chant is technically regarded as a ritualized form of speech intonation rather than as a musical exercise like the singing of metrical hymns: for this reason, Jews always speak of saying or reading a passage rather than of singing it. However, most people observing for the first time would understand it to be no different to a scripturally based praise and worship song.

Psalms, Proverbs and Job

The system of cantillation signs used throughout the Tanakh is replaced by a very different system for these three poetic books. Many of the signs may appear the same or similar at first glance, but most of them serve entirely different functions in these three books. The short narratives at the beginning and end of Job use the “regular” system, but the bulk of the book (the poetry) uses the special system. For this reason, these three books are referred to as sifrei emet (Books of Truth), the word emet meaning “truth”, but also being an acronym (אמ״ת) for the first letters of the three books (Iyov, Mishle, Tehillim).7

In Christian missionary uses

The Jewish-born Christian convert Ezekiel Margoliouth translated the New Testament to Hebrew in 1865 with cantillation marks added. It is the only completely cantillated translation of the New Testament. The translation was published by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.8

Understanding the Psalms as Music

The Book of Psalms also known as the Psalter, is the first book of the third section of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) called Ketuvim (‘Writings’), and a book of the Old Testament.9

The book is an anthology of Hebrew religious hymns. In the Jewish and Western Christian traditions, there are 150 psalms, and several more in the Eastern Christian churches.10 The book is divided into five sections, each ending with a doxology, a hymn of praise. There are several types of psalms, including hymns or songs of praise, communal and individual laments, royal psalms, imprecation, and individual thanksgivings. The book also includes psalms of communal thanksgiving, wisdom, pilgrimage, and other categories.

Many of the psalms contain attributions to the name of King David and other Biblical figures, including Asaph, the sons of Korah, Moses, and Solomon. Davidic authorship of the Psalms is not accepted as a historical fact by modern scholars, who view it as a way to link biblical writings to well-known figures; while the dating of the Psalms is “notoriously difficult”, some are considered preexilic and others postexilic.11 The English-language title of the book derives from the Greek word psalmoi (ψαλμοί), meaning ‘instrumental music’, and by extension referring to “the words accompanying the music”.12 

In Christian prayer and worship

New Testament references show that the earliest Christians used the Psalms in worship, Paul the Apostle quotes Psalms (specifically Psalms 14 and 53, which are nearly identical). Several conservative Protestant denominations sing only the Psalms (some churches also sing the small number of hymns found elsewhere in the Bible) in worship.

Psalming in modern praise and worship

There are some challenges to modern day Western Church psalming. Psalms don’t rhyme, they use forms such as acrostics that are foreign to pop music, and they certainly don’t fit neatly into the verse/chorus/bridge patterns used in pop. This may mean that the composer of modern psalm songs needs to stretch both biblical text and musical idiom so they can meet. In this way, they may not be word for word, that really wasn’t the intention of the text to the original audience any way. As some more traditional or Rabbinic forms may take offense to modern evangelical psalming, there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong cantillation; in fact, quite the opposite – most modern musicians would say, let the Holy Spirit move and abound. In this way gifts of tongues may often be part of the utterance.

Written by Dr. WIll Ryan and Dr. Matt Mouzakis

  1. Segal, J. B., The Diacritical Point and the Accents in Syriac: Oxford 1953, repr. 2003 ISBN 1-59333-032-4, ISBN 978-1-59333-032-3. ↩︎
  2. Jeffrey Burns, The Music of Psalms, Proverbs and Job in the Hebrew Bible (Jüdische Musik 9), Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2011, ISBN 344706191X. ↩︎
  3. Jacobson, Joshua (2017). “CHAPTER ONE CANTILLATION.” Chanting the Hebrew Bible (Second, Expanded ed.). Web: The Jewish Publication Society. p. 2. ↩︎
  4. The article on “Cantillation” in the Jewish Encyclopedia shows tunes for “Prophets (other readings)” for both the Western Sephardi and the Baghdadi traditions. ↩︎
  5. Lier, Gudrun, “The Revia in the Context of Decoding Masoretic Accents”, Journal of Semitics, 2011, Vol 21/1, pp. 28-51. ↩︎
  6. For a full study see Israel Yeivin, Cantillation of the Oral Law. Leshonenu 24 (1960), pp. 47-231 (Hebrew). ↩︎
  7. Newman, Zelda Kahan (2000). “The Jewish Sound of Speech: Talmudic Chant, Yiddish Intonation and the Origins of Early Ashkenaz”. The Jewish Quarterly Review. 90 (3/4): 293–336. doi:10.2307/1454758. ISSN 0021-6682. JSTOR 1454758. ↩︎
  8. Scanned versions of this translation can be found here [1], here [2] and here “Vine of David | Remnant Repository : Ezekiel Margoliouth”.  ↩︎
  9. Mazor, Lea (2011). “Book of Psalms”. In Berlin, Adele; Grossman, Maxine (eds.). The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-973004-9. ↩︎
  10. Kselman, John S. (2007). “Psalms”. In Coogan, Michael David; Brettler, Marc Zvi; Newsom, Carol Ann (eds.). The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-528880-3. ↩︎
  11. Berlin, Adele; Brettler, Marc Zvi (2004). “Psalms”. In Berlin, Adele; Brettler, Marc Zvi; Fishbane, Michael A. (eds.). The Jewish Study Bible. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-529751-5. ↩︎
  12. Murphy, Roland E. (1993). “Psalms”. In Coogan, Michael D.; Metzger, Bruce (eds.). The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-974391-9. ↩︎