Searching for the recent BS carnivals

I have been missing the Biblical Studies carnivals. In fact, I can't keep up or imagine who can with all the scholarly activity on the web concerning Biblical Studies. The list below completes the data for the master list that Phillip Long maintains.

There are too many platforms to manage too - Substack, Blue Sky, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn and lots of specific sites like The Torah .com and Paleojudaica and other media to check. Blogging has been steady for many years though, (though sometimes one can't find the blog for the ads). 

Phillip Long, Master list To october 2023 Carnival 211

212 November 2023 Phillip Long, Reading Acts

213 December 2023 Jim West, Zwinglius Redivivus (URL a year ahead of itself)

214 January 2024 Jacob J. Prahlow, Pursuing Veritas

215 February 2024 Ben, The Amateur Exegete

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217 April 2024 Ben, The Amateur Exegete

218 May 2024 Bob MacDonald, Dust

219 Summer 2024 Phillip Long, Reading Acts

220 September 2024 Ben, The Amateur Exegete

221 October 2024 Jim West, Zwinglius Redivivus

222 November 2024 Phillip Long, Reading Acts

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224 January 2025 Reuven Chaim Klein, The Rachack Review

225 February 2025 Phillip Long, Reading Acts

226 March 2025 Jim West, Zwinglius Redivivus

226 May 2025 Jim West, Zwinglius Redivivus

227 July 2025 Phillip Long, Reading Acts

228 September 2025 Phillip Long, Reading Acts

229 October 2025 Jim West, Zwinglius Redivivus

Swan has returned from the deep south

We travelled 5000 miles to the south mostly by ship -- so a long journey without blogging.

I continue to work on the Music of the Bible. I think it will take years, even generations, for the intriguing usage of the te'amim to be appreciated. They are music, yes, but how did the ancient cantors / composers use the tool that we have now deciphered for anyone who chooses to look and hear?

My work as far as it continues is concentrating on melodic motifs and their recurrences. Do these identify deliberate relationships between texts? I think so -- but now I must search to measure how the music is used to do this. It is easy to search with the accents deciphered. 

There was an example in my last post from Feb 9th before our long journey that stimulated some work on the use of the opening triad.

Job 36:6-7 Two verses beginning with an opening triad (silluq-tifha-munach) followed by the subdominant (atnah)

On my holiday I looked at about 50 verses with this opening shape. The results were fascinating.

1073 verses begin with e g B A. That’s about 4%. About 2% more contain the motif (perhaps). Only two books begin with the motif. Genesis and Esther. Job mimics this motif in its first verse. No other first verses of books contain the triad. Essentially this is equivalent to the statement that the sequence silluq tifha munach atnah says something about creation. And look at what we have above, 2 verses with that shape, and they are about the created order.

As I looked, I found some were clear to classify tentatively, others not yet fitting. I have to take care not to name a motif before I have enough information. But 1500 verses would exceed a comfortable blog post, not to mention my analytical capacity. Yes, one could ask a bot, but piano, piano, as they say.

Still, the opening of Esther using the same musical gesture is interesting because Esther also begins with cosmic scale: the empire, the extent of the kingdom, the ordering of the court. It is a political "creation scene." The same musical opening may therefore function as a macro-introduction to a world being set up. How much is our governance a random farce (with consequences) ruled by men 'who should know better'? 

Then I thought of the poignancy and comfort of Isaiah 12 -- a different motif. Haïk-Vantoura's default setting gives a haunting quality to verse 3:

Isaiah 12:3 Antiphon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost

So I considered whether this was another recognizable and distinguishable leitmotif. Notice the pause -- critical space for consideration of the support of the human creature.

Do not accept a translation or read Isaiah 12:3 like this: "With joy you shall draw water from the wells of salvation". This pulse misses the mid point rest -- the subdominant. No translation should ever treat a 1-4-1 phrase without the mid verse pause, and as far as possible, the translation should respect the word on which the pause is placed and its relative distance from the beginning of the verse. Turning with joy into an adverb is not an improvement. "And you shall joyfully draw water ..." also loses the Hebrew rhythm. (Compromise is clearly needed as illustrated in Job 38 above. The parallel in Hebrew leads with the verb, not the subject, but I let the translation compromise the placement of words on the reciting tones.)

The subdominant rest occurs in Hebrew on the word joy -- and so we must observe it. Joy is fundamental to the human need and raison d'etre. When sung according to its accentual structure, this verse is immediately grasped and retained by a congregation without instruction. They don't need to 'know' that it's an atnah or a subdominant. They retain it because it feels right. (I have 6 years of evidence for this claim. One of my congregations has used this setting 3 times when the passage is used as a psalm. The fact of such appropriate aural memory is among the strongest supports for Haïk-Vantoura's deciphering key. The key is confirmed by the words and the music teaches us how to read the words even if we cannot sing.)

Sure enough, as I looked through several chapters of Genesis, this same motif leading to the subdominant was used sparingly and with verses that support a semantic claim of sustained assurance. See if you agree that these are verses recognizing and supporting the life of a human:  

• Genesis 2.24, 3.24, unity, exclusion -- into an ordered world,
• Genesis 6.22, 7.5, 8.7,18, 9.13, obedience, preservation, covenant,
• Genesis 13.5, 14.3,16,19, growth, recovery, blessing,
• Genesis 15.6-7, faith, alignment within the promise.  

There are more, but the whole cannot be attacked at once. I hope to have Genesis out this quarter.

I think you might agree that these are key points in the text where the support of the human is explicit. One must ask also -- why this and why not in places where the sequence of accents is not used? Too many questions for one researcher. That's why I must publish so that others can hear (and for the musically untrained, see) the differences this makes even on the reading surface.

These verses are among the 4000 or so that do not rise to the announcement pitch of the munach (dominant). There is no tension to release in them, just assurance to be enjoyed.

Job 38:8-15

Continuing the previous post. Notice the regularity of the next three verses all with the same contour to begin, all with the tuba on the rest note but three differing moves to the tonic. The speaker is teaching with announcement and on the rest note even though we read it as forceful. Are we reading it well?

You'll notice also the awkward beginning of this question continuing the earlier one from verse 6 before the shout and exultation of verse 7. The shouts are an interruption. 

Job 38:8-10

Verse 8-9 -- birth imagery. The sea is clothed and swaddled: restraint without violence. Gentle language for all the rhetorical force of the speech. Care for the sea. We are right to support the Orca and the Coral.
Dominion is not domination. Rule (rdh) and control (cbw), the glosses I used in Genesis 1 concerning the human, do not require hostility. God does not bind the sea but wraps it. The sea is so powerful, a decree is shattered (wbr). Channels and runaway lanes give the sea a way to manage its turbulence. Wisdom or shrewdness (I use both glosses for kcm) is knowing where force may move, not necessarily eliminating force.

This speech so far is an interrogation encompassing the domains of earth, stars, and sea, each governed by unseen measures. The sea is held. Do we recognize a wisdom that precedes moral accounting?

Job 38:11

The sea is contained by speech. It's cresting force is acknowledged, allowing its wave to disintegrate where it breaks. We can stand in the waves knowing (with care) that they will break. And we can study such waveforms right to the infinitesimals of the wavelengths of light and the sounds of music.

Across all these 8 verses, from 4 to 11, the overall musical contour of each verse is the same whether the subject is foundation, joy, birth, clothing, channeling, or limits. Joy and limit belong to the same sequence. Boundary is not the opposite of freedom. It is its condition.

The play explores the demand of suffering: explanation will not suffice, proportionality is unthinkable, moral calculus does not work. The problem of suffering is contained within this higher order wherein we have been placed before an inescapable encounter?

הְֽ֭מִיָּמֶיךָ has two accents on the first syllable. In what order should they be applied? Haïk-Vantoura assumes that the result is g-e, effectively an ornamentation of the first note. I have interpreted the g as prevailing since the silluq is ambiguous because it is used in the text under two distinct names and for two distinct functions. This long story is more thoroughly explained in my introductory paragraphs in the book.

Dawn, a cosmic servant, executing an assigned task, actively grasps the hem of the earth. Note how verses 12 to 14 are joined by the opening note, each verse to the one previous. The garment formed by the separation of light from darkness is metaphorically shaken so that the wicked are tossed as if in a blanket, or to mix metaphors, as the clay is imaged by the seal. So it appears that the moral order is subordinate to the cosmic scale we have just come down. Dawn illuminates the topography and light exposes or is withheld and the exalted arm broken. Visibility already judges.

Where are we at the foundation of earth, at the joy, or the shouting of the children of God, and at the containment that followed? Who am I that I should know? Perhaps we are getting there but with great difficulty. We too with Job, will sigh over dust and ashes. But wisdom delights. Time is definitely strange. There is no passage of time in an electromagnetic field. Waves without mass have no pocket watch. Wisdom speaks in Proverbs 8. Perhaps even we are 'in Wisdom' as we explore the universe.

From Proverbs 8

I think you can see how much work there is to consider the music in the text. Check out the About page for available volumes. 

Some notes on the first 7 verses of Job 38

There is a reason that I have limited my comments in my Music of the Bible series. The complexity of this presentation of the Bible, through the work of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura will take many lifetimes to critique. I worked through the first dozen or so verses of Job 38. This post is only on the first 7. Many more words could be written than I have time to absorb or you time to read.

I began with a look at recurrence patterns. The final recurring word in the chapter focuses the single long passage as leading towards wisdom. I can do a maximum of 40 roots at once, so I had to eliminate a few (two of which do follow wisdom, but these join chapter 38 to a new section on animals that continues in chapter 39). There were no circular structures that were highlighted. The chapter comes across with force. 

Job 38 -- beginning

I used the prose default mode in verse 1 to distinguish the narrator from the actors. There is never a rest note in the narrator's introductory snippets until chapter 33 when the narrator comes on stage to introduce Elihu. And there, the narrator speaks in poetry. 

Verse 2: Who is this? begins the  speech on the high C with the qadma ornament carrying the tessitura even higher. This verse through its opening note connects the speech to the prior speeches. It has no mid verse rest. Verses three and four are traditional poetry with mid verse rest points. Verse three approaches the subdominant from the B, and verse four approaches from the g. 

Verse 4: Where were you when I founded Earth? Notice it is founded, not created. יָסַד is architectural: laying foundations, establishing stability, setting something so it can bear weight.

Not 'What do you know?' but 'Where were you?' Before any claim to discernment, there must be a place from which discernment could arise. בִּינָה is the ability to distinguish, to perceive relations, to tell one thing from another within a structure.

'Make it clear' is an invitation. הַגֵּד is imperative, but does not require silence from Job. It is not saying that humans know nothing, or that inquiry is illegitimate, or science futile. It is saying that wisdom begins with acknowledging where one stands, foundational ordering precedes explanation. 

Verse 5: Who set her measure? For you know.
Or who stretched out on her a line? 

We measure. We may even measure well -- and do intricate projects like the Webb Telescope. But, as is ironically implied, it is a philosophical puzzle that measurement is possible within reality. Why is it that physics can be described by equations. And we know our knowledge is limited by the probability distributions of the quantum fields. We are not mechanism and neither is creation.

Job 38 -- a place to pause for a moment

On what were her sockets sunk? I am moved by this image. It is very carefully stated. One must not translate sockets as pillars as though we were a construction project. The word for socket (adn -- close to the same letters as in Adonai) occurs twice outside of Torah, the sections in Exodus on the building of the tabernacle and the continuation in Numbers. In the building of the tabernacle it occurs 51 times. With its usage here, the earth becomes a holy place, just as the beloved of the Song is holy in the description that also uses this word socket.

Song 5:15

Who instructed her corner stone? The corner stone (אֶבֶן פִּנָּה) is not just structural. That word pnh is multifaceted. The corner stone, the facing stone, aligns walls, determines orientation, governs coherence. And yet the verb is יָרָה to instruct, to teach, to throw, or cast. If the cornerstone is 'nstructed' then, as science requires of creation: order becomes intelligible, coherence is sensible, alignment is reliable, but the instruction is more than 'ours'. We must align ourselves to the stone that faces us. But we did not instruct it. These verses are a revelation of the conditions of knowing. And we do know, in part.

The music is restrained. Apart from the revia-mugrash (which I call tuba announcing the return to the tonic), there are no ornaments. There are no verses from verses 2 to 11 starting on a pitch other than the tonic, i.e. no explicit verse connections as there are later in the chapter. I am still looking for some clues as to why some verses approach the tonic from below and why some from above. I also ask why some verses return gently to the tonic, some without tuba, some with, and others (in poetry only) move from B to e -- munach to silluq.

3. e B A, tuba e.
4. e B g A, tuba, f# e.
5. e B g B A, C e g B e.
6. e g B A, f# tuba, B e.
7. e g B A, tuba, f# e.

Verse 7 lifts us from support to celebration, from grounding to witness. That's why we love the beauty of mathematics and science and the order of creation. It's not important that it is big, but that it is ordered both in the infinitesimally small and enormously large, and even in the infinities of the real number system. And we should be encouraged.

People say the Word is written. But note the absence of the word socket from most of the books of the Hebrew canon. Part of reading with comprehension is to discern what is not written.

We can face the questions and sing the music. Someone should mount this stage play. The book with the music for every verse is available here. 

Words, words, words

I remember trying to write to my grandchildren. Words are plentiful but it seems that a great cloud of related words is required to carry sense from one person to another. My brother maintained a demand for defining your terms in conversation. This kind of precision is impossible. One cannot encode words like trust and truth. The closest we get is in science and mathematics, but we know now that at the base of reality, there is not a bunch of little balls in a billiard game where any degree of determinism can be applied with ultimate certainty.

Hence the need for a canon with which to measure our words. A canon is a body of tradition and text in which some group of humans places their trust. It is the Greek word for measure from which we also get our word 'cane'.

The conclusion is that words are part of a semantic field. Like electrons, they are neither particle nor wave but both. Words live and have their sense in a semantic field, just as electrons and photons exist in an electromagnetic field. 

Complex Hebrew Word-Fields.

I have been exploring word fields with ChatGPT. This is the latest with a pair of Hebrew stems that have many homonyms in my translation. There is some real reflection in the LLM comments on my prompts that stands against the tendencies to power as a management style. Words are like electrons and light. They seem to be particles, but they are really fields.

For those of you into PSA and other theories of divine violence, this conversation might be of interest to you in reframing strength. 

Music of the Bible -- the Book of Job -- press release

A presentation of the Hebrew Bible with all its music verse by verse. 

VICTORIA, BC – In a work that bridges antiquity with innovation, Biblical scholar, database programmer, and musician, Bob MacDonald, unveils Music of the Bible: The Book of Job, a first available volume of a complete edition of the Hebrew Bible that restores the music encoded in the Hebrew text. This is Scripture as it was meant to be performed and heard. Transforming the cantillation marks into modern music notation, MacDonald offers readers and singers alike the opportunity to hear the voice of Job, his comforters, and the other notorious actors in the play as preserved in the earliest available Masoretic text. Each verse presents the musical score supported by transliterated lyrics for singers, the diacritics isolated for Hebrew readers, and a transcription for reading Hebrew accurately in our commonly used Roman alphabet. The result is a Hebrew Bible that has never been seen or heard until now. “The tone of voice,” writes MacDonald “has been missing from the written word for centuries. This project aims to restore it. Now we can hear the grief, the joy, the proclamations, the aural interconnections in the text.”

With a translator's precision and a cantor’s sensitivity, the text is brought to life as song. A pioneering blend of language, liturgy, and technology, The Music of the Bible series is designed for learning. As the only book of scripture that uses both the prose and the poetry sets of accents, Job is the first available volume of the series. Anyone who is learning Hebrew will find its multi-part presentation a pleasure to read and sing. Cantors will delight in the music, different from modern tradition but a justified deciphering of the fundamental uses of the cantillation marks. The music reveals both poetic structure and distant musical allusions from one verse to others. The Book of Job begins in its opening prose verse by mimicking the opening of the book of Genesis. Theologians will find the music revealing. This presentation can stand as both study tool and devotional companion, revealing Job’s determined patience.

Job is the first available volume of the series. Torah, Prophets, and all the Writings have been analysed, developed, typeset, and considered as a whole. The deciphering of the music has been subjected to stress tests and consistency analysis. All of the music files are available under separate cover for composers and arrangers to use as raw material. This presentation will challenge your understanding, lead you to refreshing questions, and invite you into a restored relationship to the Holy Text.

Availability: Music of the Bible: The Book of Job is available now in EPUB and paperback format. Visit https://bit.ly/3YOZtVG to learn more, full media kit (incl. sample pages), or to request a review.  On Amazon here.