Summarizing the errors / differences between Aleppo and Leningrad

I am grateful to the commenter on the post here who wants me to learn about meteg and ga'ya. These are signs I cannot fathom, and they interfere with the music. If they are important, they need a different sign and Unicode that does not confuse the music. 

Some preliminary examples I reported on here in November. 

I have completed about 85% of the Bible so far, jot by jot -- the music is definitely an example of jots and tittles. But very important. Jesus tells us that not one such jot is unimportant. But 99% of Christians who read the Bible are not the slightest bit aware that there is a musical score coded in the Hebrew text. Truths abstracted from the text lack tone of voice -- so they will be confused and give bad advice and bad theology from the text.

Here is a preliminary graph of the error count by verse. 3,102 verses with one or more errors (excluding Samuel, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah at this time). Details are possible but a lot of work and I probably won't take that on till I am finished this project if then.

Percentage of verses with errors related to silluq

As I noted too brusquely in my comment: This error has crept in over the last 1000 years. Every edition since Aleppo has more and more of these vertical signs in it. I began my study with the Leningrad codex. I now see it contains thousands of errors in the reproduction of the text. 95% of them are errors to do with silluq. 95% of those are additional marks -- and they are without rhyme or reason. As far as I can see, they occur apparently randomly and not with any consistency relative to long vowels. The other 5% are removals or confusion with munah or mercha.

Apart from visual mistakes and fatique (putting the pen down in the wrong place), it is likely that most of these were caused by confusion between musical intent of the silluq and pronunciation intent with meteg, a separate magisterium.

Accents under the text repeated in a single word

Yesterday's post proved prophetic. After completing over 80% of the Bible and manipulating and deleting about 50,000 images -- that's a guess but probably not far off the mark -- I had to correct some bits and pieces in the psalms. It's not very easy. LTR processing is minimally supported in Musescore as in a lot of other word processors. And correcting the te'amim is not well supported with the keyboard or onscreen keyboards I have.

Anyway - it's possible and only confusing because I had several books and directories and pages and other apps open on my desktop at once. A test of my nearly 80 year old short term memory.

I found in Judges two verses that had doubled silluq under the same word. This produces a spondee affect if you pay attention to the stress. 

There is a short word (from the stem lqk) in verses 17:2 and 19:1 in Judges with two consecutive silluq accents on each of its two syllables. There are 611 instances of two silluqs on one word remaining in my database of the Leningrad codex. Sometimes these are legitimate at the end of a verse for cadential emphasis. There are 18 instances of this particular diacritic combination on the stem lqk, e.g. לֻֽקַּֽח, to take, in the Scriptures. Most of them are in books I haven't yet done -- Samuel and Chronicles among them. The musician can make something of this apparent brief spondaic pulse.

17:2 of Judges. It is rare for the same accent under the text to be repeated on the same word.
But it does happen.

In the Psalms, doubling of an accent under the text occurs twice with a repeated munah, the fifth note of the scale, B, in Psalms 18:16, and 104:7. In each case the extra stress is on the last syllable of the word. Only one other accent below the text, the silluq, e, the tonic, is repeated on the same word. This occurs about 600 times in the Bible of which 93 are in the psalms. If you ever study the psalms -- and who would study them without the music  -- watch for them and imagine the emphatic pulse. 

Psalms 18:46 - three accents under one word!

In Psalms 18:46, I found three accents under a single word. One of these was a third silluq in the Leningrad codex. I corrected the middle one based on the earlier Aleppo codex to a d'khi, g, the third note of the scale. This changes the character of the final cadence.

Of course -- and I didn't put this in my instructions yesterday -- the addition of two bars changes the bar numbering for the rest of the psalm. So it's more than one image that has to be regenerated. I proved the correction process. It is independent of the database. So my database does not have to live past my best by date.

As to the other accents under the text, they are never doubled in a single word. One needs the database for a claim like this -- it requires a query or a filter like this: 

length(heb_word)-length(replace(heb_word,'1469')) >=8 and book_cd='PSALMS'

The answer is zero for all accents under the text except silluq and munah.

In case I forget

Here's how my 18-volume EPUB can be updated. I will assume that the tools used are Calibre EPUB software and Musescore.

To update the SVG images:

1. Open the MSCZ file for the chapter.
2. Adjust the Hebrew above the text to correct the te'amim as required. You may need a real word processor to format and type the Hebrew correctly. I could not copy Unicode from mgketer because it does not use the standard Unicode that I read to generate the music from the database.
3. Adjust the music to correspond to the Hebrew in accordance with the deciphering key. This you have to do by hand depending on the change to the te'amim that you are making. Adjust barring if needed -- join or separate bars with the tools menu. Adjust the bars changed to dotted. Or select them all and make them short lines. Bar lines are largely irrelevant in any case.
4. Check the lines for alignment of the Hebrew.
5. Export to SVG.
6. Run the batch file for the chapter to rename the files to what is expected in the EPUB.
7. Delete the EPUB SVG files for the chapter.
8. Import the new SVG files.
9. Change the Hebrew in the html file - the section that shows the te'amim only, to agree with the changes made in the MSCZ file.
10. Delete the SVG files on your computer.

The English guide can be changed in the html file as needed.

To underlay a new arrangement with language other than Hebrew:

1. Open the MSCZ file for the chapter.
2. Adjust the page length to the size you want to your score to be. 
3. Follow your musical imagination. Here are some of my earlier thoughts on this process.

At the moment I am not making these files public. If you want them now as opposed to whenever, let me know. Best step on the road for this is to buy the first available EPUB. Or write a review.

Best approach might be to get in touch with mgketer.org and write a program that will translate their Aleppo Codex text into music using a deciphering key. This is a long process filled with learning.

In case you have forgotten

Passing the torch -- How to read the Bible with its music.

1. Sometime in the last 15 years before Covid-19,  Jonathan Wheeler gave me a DVD containing all of the work of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura. Jonathan Wheeler was the editor of the English translation of her magnum opus: The Music of the Bible Revealed. The contents of the DVD are available on my Google Drive, and on OneDrive, and there is a copy in iCloud. One or more of these should work for you. If you have an interest and a place to keep such a collection, please feel free to download the files.
2. This blog, as long as it lasts, has since 2010 or so devoted many posts to learning, interpreting and exploring the music revealed by Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key. Some of these posts have been very popular, so I know there is some interest. 
3. My final 'technical' project on the subject will be the preparation of the 18 volumes I am working on that display Haïk-Vantoura's work verse by verse. These volumes allow anyone to see and hear the Hebrew Bible in a form never available before. There are helps in the first volume on The Book of Job that were written for non-musicians and non-Hebrew students as well.

The project is over 80% completed. I prepared it for myself. This is what I want to read as support for learning Hebrew. 

When I have fully extracted the remaining books (the last few chapters of Judges, Samuel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles), I will begin to think again. I hope to write short summaries of the character of the music in each volume. I want to separate my work from my database (Oracle) and from custom software and ultimately from myself. 

The e-pub form of each volume is fully updatable by anyone competent in music tech and html/svg/css files as used in an e-pub. I will explain have explained my process for updating a chapter in a separate post. The music files (.mscz) and rename files (.bat) for each chapter will be available from the publisher for each volume as it appears.

I hope there will be users who want to open the music files (use Musescore), update the music if there are errors in the Hebrew, and update the translation when required. Perhaps there will be users who want to develop an arrangement of the music. I'm still looking for the Bach who could make these verses sing. The whole is as clear as I can make it. I have acknowledged the technicians whose products I used in the Book of Job, the first available volume.

Regrettably, without the database, I cannot make it easy to update the concordance, but with luck, I may get one more stab at that process in the future. (There have been just 99 translation changes since the last updates of the 401 pages (11-2023) -- that's about 1 in 3000 verses, or .3%. But there have been over 3000 errors to date corrected in the WLC musical data based on a comparison to the Aleppo codex. About 10-30% of verses, depending on the chapter, have been affected by copying errors, omissions, and additions. I am sure I have not found them all. By concentrating on a known source of errors, extra silluqs, errors in silluq, and missing silluqs, I have restored the thrust of the vocal line to the earliest witness.) 

For further information and a brief reaction from another student of Hebrew cantillation, please see this post on linked in.

Names

I have been working on Joshua and I see in my work the traditional transliteration of Rahab -- to Raxab. This is a transliteration of ket ח to x that I must have made in very early days, like 15 years ago. I want now to change the transcription to Rakab (SimHebrew k) rather than the usual Rahab. It doesn't affect much and I can make the changes in the database and in some existing book drafts globally. But it opens a can of worms in the semantic domain of Names. Such a can could occupy a year of discussion so I move slowly. 

But it is an utterly glorious can of worms. I shows how flexible is our use of the Latin letters. There are about 500 changes from x to k if I follow this first lead up and don't stop there, but what about a common word like Hebron? That should be Kebron. That would produce another host of changes from h to k. The letter ket ח (traditionally chet) is the second 'h' type letter in the Hebrew Alphabet. Neither the 'h' nor the 'x' is entirely out of place as a transcription. English translations of Biblical Hebrew are equally inconsistent with this process. E.g. 'x' is commonly used for Artaxerxes.

This pronunciation of 'x' is Spanish -- I learned that tidbit on YouTube from the Monty Python skit on the Spanish Inquisition! No one is ever expecting the Spanish Inquisition! There they reference the later grand inquisitor, cardinal Ximenes (Jimenes). Curious how many letters of the Latin alphabet over its usage in several languages, can carry the voiceless velar fricative, often represented for the English speaker as ch as in Loch. Hebrew ket, and caf, very close in sound, and Spanish x or j for similar sounds.

I have come to the conclusion that there are enough clues in my transcriptions for the music for a beginner to figure out the potential sounds. They have whatever letter I chose for ket, and then the SimHebrew and the lyrics to compare. And this need would remain true whatever strategy I use for names. And I have used many and varied strategies!

I made a dozen or so changes in the database and a few changes in volumes I had already done in the music. Most of the names seem to be in the books I haven't yet done: Joshua, Judges, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles. Some day I will update the concordance. Given that 'x' is a standard phonetic sign for the voiceless velar fricative, I probably won't change the transcription for the rest of them.

Using the Aleppo Codex images for a change

mgketer -- the easy to read and navigate Aleppo Codex site is down -- so I switched to the Aleppo codex online as an exercise and did Joshua 1. I can't work on Daniel since there is no image of that part of the codex. There's a story here and fire and so on. But switching did not prove impossible thanks to the clear images on line and a very useful index from David Stark in Seattle -- just a stone's throw from Victoria.

Here's the image to compare with the Westminster Codex that I have in my database:

Aleppo codex Joshua 1:1-3

I did chapter 1 as a test. Here's the output with the music for verses 1-3. 

Music for verses 1-3

I think it might be a bit harder to finish my project if I have to use the manuscript images.

Dating the DSS etc

There's probably no BS Carnival this month, And I didn't find one from last month - but maybe I will start collecting things again. This one and this one on new techniques for dating the DSS are both of interest even if bypassing the very complex analysis.

And who wouldn’t want to know more about the origins of the second Death concept. Read all about it in the Targums here. 

Jonathan and I are in the process of publishing the book of Job. If you are interested in reviewing, please have a look at the announcement here.

Does anyone know what happened to mgketer.org. It seems to be no longer available. This will bring my project to a grinding halt. I hope it comes back so I can finish the last 20% of the project.