Psalm 23: The Original Hebrew Melody Deciphered

This is an even more fascinating (and deeply spiritually moving) entry on the ancient music of the Bible. Here is an explanation of how the musical notation was deciphered, by the same musician and researcher quoted in my last post, Michael Levy:

"Following the tragic destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, the entire musical legacy of the Temple, both vocal and instrumental, seemed to be forever lost. However, the Masoretic scribes preserved (along with the biblical consonantal text itself) an ancient "reading tradition" dating back (according to themselves) to the Second Temple Era; and beginning about 1,200 years ago, they painstakingly copied that tradition out in exacting detail. The Masoretic Text is still the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible that we have.

Part of the 'reading tradition' the Masoretes preserved was a series of 'accents' ("Te Amim"), which occur throughout the entire Tanakh (Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim) in two systems. The Masoretes did not understand the meaning or the monumental significance of these accents, and for centuries, there have been countless theories as to what their original meaning was.

Most theories have started from the assumption that they were to emphasize precise points of grammar in the text. Leaving aside all these debates, Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura concentrated solely on finding a musical meaning of these "accents".

Through countless experiments and a laborious process of irrefutable verification (using the Hebrew verbal phrase structure itself as her 'Rosetta Stone'), she finally realized that all these symbols represent musical tones: the 7 degrees of a heptatonic scale, or else ornaments of one to three notes! The accents, were, in fact transcriptions of hand gestures - which formed the ancient musical notation system of cheironomy, whereby a specific hand gesture represented a specific change in the pitch of a melody."

"The astonishing significance of Haik Vantoura's musical accomplishment , if true, is that not only does Haik Vantoura reveal to us such magnificent music of such incredible spiritual worth, but in doing so, she also revealed to us the only surviving example so far known, of the world's complete art music - written maybe 1000 years earlier than the 2000 year old ancient Greek 'Skolion of Seikilos'; the only other piece of written music from antiquity to have survived completely intact, in its complete, original form."

Of course, it is not certain that this hypothesis is correct, and there's really no way that it ever could be. But in addition to being a perfectly logical and self-consistent theory, the fact that it actually works, musically, is, in my opinion, a very strong argument in its favor. And it also is consistent with the best explanation of other anomalies which appear in the Psalms and do not appear to be part of their actual poetry, such as the frequently-found "To the director of music" and the even more frequent appearance of the word "selah", whose meaning is unsure. The best theory of its meaning is "pause", and it is thus translated in the Septuagint which, in my view, is fairly conclusive, since that translation was made during the second temple period by learned Jewish rabbis from Jerusalem. And that would, as I said, coincide perfectly with the existence of musical notation in the text.