Psalms 51:19 (Hebrew) The offerings of God are a broken spirit

 So how would you set this text if you were an ancient scribe, say, in some scribal corner of ancient Babylon during the exile?

You are copying the psalm and come to this verse. What does a reciting note mean to you? How do you prepare the ole-veyored that will approach the first cadence in this tricolon? What can you see?

If I concentrate on the WLC, which is my text base for the music, I find the verse is this.

Psalms 51:19 WLC

But the Aleppo codex is like this.

Aleppo Codex
(Image from here - Ardon bar Hama.
using the index available from J. David Stark.)

Notice that in the WLC זִֽבְחֵ֣י אֱלֹהִים֮ ר֪וּחַ נִשְׁבָּ֫רָ֥ה the accent on the third word ruach is a Munah - declarative on the dominant, where a scribe has clearly ignored the Mahpak somewhere in the tradition between Aleppo and Westminster. Note that they were copying deaf. They had no knowledge of what these symbols signified as a musical notation.

The higher note is found in the approach to the ole-veyored 3 times where the lower note with a jump from the C, a diminished 7th, is found 38 times in the WLC - those numbers should be altered in my data - but I am not taking this change on just at the moment! My books clearly use the WLC for the most part, But this could be one of many footnotes that I have not written.

I looked square at this and completely missed the difference, because I was not looking at ruach but at the first word ziv-chei. The music is as follows, and is suitable to the words - a spirit broken.

Psalms 51:19 Aleppo - add a dotted barline between the C and the d#
(to show the change in reciting note).

A lesson for me: we see what we are looking for. Look aside. Read more carefully.

Note - as in all the posts on this blog since 2013, the music transcriptions are produced programmatically from a database using my transcription program from Unicode to Music XML. I made a lot of mistakes - or at least was quite inconsistent - in the past few days as I tried to understand this and manipulate the music manually.