Remember the accents below the text

 Any reader of these posts will recognize that I have spent the last 14 years immersed in the accents (te'amim) of the Hebrew Bible and their music. I am reviewing how to approach teaching and explaining this feature of the Bible. This first post is on the accents below the text. These define the recitation pitch or what I have elsewhere called the reciting note. 

I have posted this table before. This is an updated version as an appendix to all that has gone before and as a preliminary list for what will come after.

• -- different ways of reaching out to a reader who could learn to use the accents more effectively 
• -- as music, 
• -- as tone of voice, 
• -- as showing interconnections between verses and chapters and books, 
• -- as learning how the Bible actually sings rather than only speaks to us, 
• -- and consequently, as learning about the tone of voice of the Word of God.

Here's the first part. Imagine this running from c to C in the octave that you are comfortable singing in.

Te'amim (accents, cantillation) Below the text

Darga, c, and tevir, d, are used only in the 21 books. 

Galgal, d is used in the poetry of the three books, psalms, prophets, and the speeches of Job and occasionally in the prose books.

Silluq, e is the tonic and is the default starting note for a verse in all 24 books if no other note is specified on the first syllable. Silluq cannot be distinguished in Unicode from metheg. Methegs have proliferated in the copying process from 900 CE to the present. They are a help to vowel pronunciation on some words and are totally unrelated to the music. This confusion is damaging to the recitation of the text. Verify all inner-verse silluqim from the Aleppo codex.

Merkha, f, is used in all 24 books.

Tifha, g, is used in all 24 books and appears under the the centre of the letter.

D'khi, g, is used in the 3 books and appears under and before the letter.

Atnah, A, is used in all 24 books and is the primary resting point is a verse that contains it.

Munah, B, is used in all 24 books. 

Mahpakh, C, is used in all 24 books,

Yetiv, C, is used in the 21 books only.

dm is only used 14 times in the 21 books only. 

 Supposing you wanted to sing these you would need two sequences, one for the three books and one for the 24.

Here is the scale of C in the default mode for the 21 books.

How the accents below the text work in the 21 books -- defining the change in recitation pitch

This example introduces the symbols. We begin on the tonic, with silluq, the name of the accent that moves the reciting note to the tonic. Silluq is the default start position if no other accent is specified. All verses end on the tonic, so I have put silluq at the end of this sequence also.

I put darga into bar 1 after the default silluq so we can also sing the scale beginning on low c (darga). This is the lowest reciting note. Observe that the reciting note changes on the syllable that contains the accent. So the first syllable of darga is on the current reciting note e, and the second syllable containing the darga accent changes the reciting note to the c. The word tevir continues on the current reciting note and sets the recitation to d on its second syllable. The first bar above sings all the symbols below the text, each of which designates a particular reciting note.

Here is a similar scale for the 3 books.

How the accents below the text work in the 3 books -- defining the change in recitation pitch

We're going to have some fun with this. And as a result you will never read the complex discussions of accents in the past 1000 years again without laughing at how hard the writers like Gesenius and Wickes make us work to understand essentially nothing.

You can see the accents under the text here. For this and the next post I will ignore them.