Music of Amos chapters 3 and 4

What are the unique motifs in the musical phrases within a section of the Bible? There are always stats if you don't have time to listen to every song!

The opening of Amos chapters 3, 4, and 5 is one such unique phrase. Tarsin (gershaim) with lyric 'hear' (wmyu) starts a verse 3 times. There is one difference in the three. Chapter 4 lacks the direct object marker. No other verses in the Bible use this start for the word 'hear'.

Tarsin (gershaim) with lyric 'hear' (wmyu) starts a verse 3 times.

Tarsin with the tonic begins a verse 675 times.

Tarsin itself is used 1,660 times.

Given this unique phrase, I thought I would check out the use of qarne (over the resh on the second syllable) with awr (אֲשֶׁר֩) that I noted in the first post in this series. This ornament on the very common relative pronoun occurs 119 times out of 5,612 opportunities. It is rare - 2% of the occurrences.

I noticed while doing this that most verses in Amos are verse by verse unique musical phrases. This is not uncommon. 14,790 verses of the 23,197 in the Hebrew Bible are unique. What makes them unique? Usually it is the ornamentation. The verses that have identical shape in Amos have no accents above the text. The consequential verses in chapter 1 show this commonality.

A common musical shape - (41 occurrences). Notice there are no accents above the text.

1:4, e f g# B ^A g# f e - 46 verses have this form;
1:7,10, e f g# B ^A g# e - 41 verses have this form;
1:12, e f g# ^A g# f e - 68 verses have this form.

I wonder though whether some note sequences (i.e. accent sequences) with or without the accents above the text carry information about the verses that could be deciphered from their shape. Possibly some of this could be translated into natural language for the non-musician.

A recurring word pattern in Amos 4

Common shapes often occur with repeated words. So in Amos, the phrase an oracle of Yahweh with some variation occurs 21 times, 10 of these in chapters 3 and 4. Verses 8 to 11 of chapter 4 has a clear pattern that is easy to see both in the words and in the music. In the pdf below for chapter 3 and 4, search for oracle to see the musical variations in verses 3:10, 13, 15 and 4:3, 4, 6, 8-11.